Internet services provider Cloudflare has revealed that a glitch in its bot detection system caused an outage that disrupted roughly 20% of websites, including several crypto platforms.
In a post-mortem published Tuesday, Cloudflare explained that a “feature file” used by its Bot Management System—designed to protect against cyberattacks—exceeded its normal size limit, triggering a software failure.
“We are sorry for the impact to our customers and to the Internet in general. Given Cloudflare’s importance in the Internet ecosystem any outage of any of our systems is unacceptable.”
Cloudflare initially suspected the outage was the result of a large-scale Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, but later confirmed there was no cyberattack or malicious activity involved.
The company manages roughly 20% of global internet traffic and supports about one-third of the top 10,000 websites, apps, and services.
The outage affected major platforms including Coinbase, Blockchain.com, Ledger, BitMEX, Toncoin, Arbiscan, and DefiLlama, as well as X and ChatGPT. The incident sparked discussions among crypto commentators about the industry’s dependence on centralized infrastructure—a vulnerability also highlighted last month when Amazon Web Services experienced a network outage.
A spokesperson for EthStorage, which provides a service that lets Ethereum function as a web server, told Cointelegraph that the recent AWS and Cloudflare outages highlight how “centralized infrastructure will always create single points of failure.”
The company added, “A fully decentralized web stack is more crucial than ever.”
Vitalik Buterin Calls for Decentralization
Last Wednesday, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin released a “Trustless Manifesto,” urging developers to never compromise on decentralization in pursuit of wider adoption.
Buterin, alongside Ethereum Foundation researchers Yoav Weiss and Marissa Posner, emphasized that crypto platforms lose trustlessness the moment they rely on a hosted node or centralized relayer. While these setups may seem harmless, each additional checkpoint introduces a potential chokepoint.
