Ethereum (ETH) infrastructure developer Infura’s API suffered a major outage on Nov. 11, forcing several exchanges to suspend ETH withdrawals.
- The service outage began on Nov. 11 at 8:12 UTC, resulting in delays in the price feeds of ETH and ERC-20 tokens
- While the service is up and running again, the team is examining the affected components, which include the Ethereum mainnet archive data, filters, logs and APIs
- Several crypto entities, including Binance, Bithumb and MetaMask, faced issues, resulting in suspension of withdrawals
- Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao said that the exchange noticed that the Ethereum chain had been split, with Etherscan and Blockchair recording two different chains at block 11234873
- Infura runs nodes on the Ethereum blockchain, and those nodes that did not upgrade to a newer version continued on a minority chain
- Blockchain developer Nikita Zhavoronkov explained that what happened was “technically an unannounced hard fork”; he went onto say that this was the biggest issue Ethereum has faced since the DAO attack in 2016
- Owned by ConsenSys, Infura is the default service provider for MetaMask; the team has said that it is understanding the root cause, with a full post-mortem expected after it is fully fixed
