Cloudflare Outage Knocks Crypto Platforms and Social Networks Offline
Cloudflare outage sparks chaos for crypto investors and social media users worldwide
Cloudflare suffered a major outage that briefly knocked out access to several leading crypto platforms and social media sites, underscoring how dependent the digital economy remains on a handful of infrastructure providers. The incident disrupted users trying to reach the front end of exchanges, blockchain explorers and communication channels across the internet.
The company reported an “internal service degradation” at 11:48 am UTC on Tuesday and later said engineers had deployed a fix. In a status update, Cloudflare confirmed that services were restored but added that its team would keep monitoring systems to ensure stability and prevent further issues.
Users reported trouble accessing platforms including X, Truth Social, Coinbase, Blockchain.com, Ledger, BitMEX, Toncoin, Arbiscan and DefiLlama. Some services, such as Kraken, told users that a fix had been applied earlier than others, and appeared to come back online more quickly. By contrast, platforms like BlueSky and Reddit did not seem to be affected by the disruption.
A Cloudflare spokesperson said the problem stemmed from an auto-generated configuration file used to manage potentially malicious traffic. That file became larger than expected and caused a crash in the software that routes traffic for several of the company’s services, temporarily cutting off access for many customers.
Security experts warned the outage is a clear reminder of systemic risk in today’s web. Tribe Payments chief information security officer Fadl Mantash said that when a single upstream provider fails, the consequences ripple across industries, affecting everything from social networks to online shopping and payment systems.
The episode also highlights a persistent contradiction in crypto. Even as the industry promotes decentralization, many exchanges and Web3 services still rely on centralized infrastructure like Cloudflare or Amazon Web Services. A similar AWS issue in October previously disrupted Coinbase, Robinhood and MetaMask for hours.
