Cloudflare experienced a major outage Which led to a widespread outage across thousands of websites and applications on Tuesday.
Many large, centralized crypto services rely on Cloudflare to help with heavy traffic. BitMEX faced a service outage while there was also a significant downtime for Telegram-linked Toncoin. But the outage extended beyond cryptocurrencies, with platforms like X or ChatGPT also down, affecting millions of people.
this This episode comes just weeks after Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced an outage that blocked access to major blockchains such as Coinbase’s Base chain as well as Infura which powers many of the blockchains.
Tuesday’s outage reignited the conversation about the need to decentralize infrastructure to keep the internet running.
“Today’s Cloudflare outage shows how vulnerable the digital economy is. When a single provider faces issues, the impact is not contained; it ripples across industries, touching everything from social media platforms to e-commerce payments and back-end payment services,” said Fazal Mantas, chief information security officer at Tribe Payments, in an email to CoinDesk.
“Payments are particularly vulnerable,” Mantaş added. “The infrastructure behind a single transaction relies on a series of cloud platforms, processors, third-party APIs, authenticators, and card systems. When any link in this chain fails, the entire journey can be interrupted.”
Some in the cryptocurrency world have called for wider adoption of DePIN to combat such issues. Dibben, O Decentralized physical infrastructure networksuses blockchain incentives to coordinate and reward people for building and maintaining real-world infrastructure. This could be anything from wireless networks, to sensors, to power systems, and the purpose is to not depend on a central company. Users thus contribute devices or services and earn tokens in return, creating a community-managed open infrastructure layer.
One such leader pushing this is the CEO of Gaimin, a DePIN project focused on distributed cloud infrastructure. “We must move to a truly distributed cloud model,” said Nokvi Dan Elidason. “By harnessing existing, globally dispersed resources such as underutilized personal computers, Gaimin is building a network where capabilities are spread across regions and continents, making it difficult for a single mistake to bring down the entire global system.”
“This is the only way to protect the digital economy from the inevitable fragility of centralization,” Dan Illidason added.
Read more: Global Cloudflare Outage Spreads to Cryptocurrencies; Multiple front tips down
