Cloudflare outage takes down 20% of internet, exposing crypto industry's reliance on centralized infrastructure

Source: CryptoNewsNet Original Title: Cloudflare blames database error for outage that took down 20% of the internet Original Link: Internet services provider Cloudflare said that a fault in its bot detection system triggered an outage that took down around 20% of webpages, including several crypto platforms.

Cloudflare said in a post-mortem statement on Tuesday that a “feature file” used by its Bot Management System to fight off cyberattacks grew beyond its normal limit, leading to a failure in Cloudflare’s software.

“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.”

The company initially suspected the incident was caused by a hyper-scale Distributed Denial of Service attack, but confirmed there was no cyberattack or malicious activity.

Cloudflare handles roughly 20% of internet traffic and powers around one-third of the top 10,000 websites, apps and services.

Its outage took out the websites for certain major crypto platforms, blockchain explorers like Arbiscan, DeFi analytics platforms like DefiLlama, as well as X and ChatGPT, leading some crypto commentators to remark on the crypto industry’s reliance on centralized systems. Similar concerns were raised when Amazon Web Services suffered a network outage last month.

A spokesperson for EthStorage, which offers a product allowing Ethereum to be used as a web server, told Cointelegraph that the AWS and Cloudflare outages show “centralized infrastructure will always create single points of failure.”

“A complete decentralized web stack is needed more than ever,” the company said.

Vitalik Buterin calls for prioritizing decentralization

Last Wednesday, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin authored a “Trustless Manifesto,” which called on industry builders to never sacrifice decentralization in pursuit of adoption.

Buterin and Ethereum Foundation researchers Yoav Weiss and Marissa Posner said crypto platforms sacrifice trustlessness from the moment that they integrate a hosted node or centralized relayer, explaining that while it feels harmless, each new checkpoint becomes a potential chokepoint.