A brief but widespread Cloudflare outage struck early this morning starting around 8:56 UTC, causing “500 internal server errors” that rippled across the internet. It lasted roughly 20-40 minutes before a fix was deployed, and services are now stabilizing.
Cloudflare’s status page confirms the issue affected their Dashboard and APIs, leading to failed requests for many customers. No evidence of a cyberattack; it stemmed from an internal glitch during scheduled maintenance in data centers like Chicago and Detroit, compounded by a recent change to disable some logging aimed at mitigating a React CVE vulnerability.
Impact on Crypto Apps and Exchanges
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Crypto wasn’t the only victim—LinkedIn, Shopify, Canva, Zoom, and even Downdetector itself went dark temporarily—but the sector felt it acutely due to heavy reliance on Cloudflare for traffic routing, security, and API calls.
Coinbase: Login failures and app crashes; users couldn’t access trades or wallets.
Kraken: Partial downtime, with withdrawal and margin functions frozen.
Upbit: Full outage for Korean users, halting trading during peak hours.
Uniswap and other DeFi protocols: Interface loading errors; some couldn’t connect wallets or execute swaps. OpenSea: NFT marketplace inaccessible, blocking buys/sells.
Indian platforms like Zerodha and Groww saw trading halts, amplifying financial losses in active markets. This echoes a larger November 18 outage that also hammered crypto like Arbiscan, DeFiLlama, sparking debates on X about “decentralization” being more hype than reality when front-ends lean on centralized infra like Cloudflare.
DeFi protocols being inaccessible during a Cloudflare outage should not be able to label their protocol as decentralized. Cloudflare outage underway and it’s taking crypto with it… Massive disruption across the board.
By ~9:20 UTC, the root cause was addressed, and sites began recovering. They’re actively watching for aftershocks, with a full post-mortem blog post promised soon. This is the second major hiccup in weeks, raising red flags on single-provider risks.
Cloudflare powers ~20% of the web, so even short blips can cost millions in lost trades like slippage in volatile crypto markets. Crypto infrastructure is much less decentralized than most people think—and Cloudflare outages are the perfect litmus test.
Actual dependency on Cloudflare / centralized points. Infura, Alchemy, QuickNode, Ankr all route through Cloudflare for many chains. Etherscan, BscScan, Arbiscan, Polygonscan ? all behind Cloudflare.
Uniswap.app, Aave.app, OpenSea, Blur, etc. ? nearly all on Cloudflare, graph.network and hosted service still hit by Cloudflare DNS/CDN Chainlink website and some node operators use Cloudflare.
Nearly every major bridge UI (Hop, Synapse, Stargate) ? Cloudflare. Real-world proof points to June 2022 Cloudflare outage ? Uniswap, Discord, and half of DeFi front-ends died while the actual Ethereum blockchain kept running perfectly.
November 18, 2025 outage ? Same story: blockchain fine, front-ends and explorers 100% down. December 5, 2025 ? Third time in six months. The irony in numbers~80–90 % of all DeFi and NFT volume goes through interfaces that die the moment Cloudflare hiccups.
Even “decentralized” front-ends hosted on IPFS still usually resolve DNS through Cloudflare or use Cloudflare gateways. Projects that actually survive Cloudflare outages very few, but they exist. Raw IPFS hashes (ipfs://…) or ENS contenthash pointing directly to IPFS
Some die-hard projects like older versions of dYdX, GMX still work via direct node connection. The blockchain layer is genuinely decentralized. The user-facing internet layer is often more centralized than traditional finance websites.
Until most major dApps move their front-ends to truly decentralized hosting IPFS + ENS contenthash + no Cloudflare DNS/CDN/gateway, every few months we’ll keep getting the same wake-up call:
“Decentralized finance” currently runs on a single company in San Francisco that can accidentally or deliberately turn off half the ecosystem with one bad config change.
That’s the state of crypto infrastructure in 2025—decentralized where it matters most but still painfully centralized where users actually touch it.