Cloudflare, a major company responsible for executing a variety of website functions on the Internet, suffered a downtime on July 17, affecting a large number of website functionalities. Downtime eventually caused a drop in Bitcoin (BTC) transactions.
“Cloudflare’s DNS [Domain Name System] The disruption can be seen reflected in Bitcoin’s transaction transmission rate, presumably because popular web wallets became inaccessible, “Bitcoin engineer and expert Jameson Lopp said in a July 17 tweet. Lopp’s tweet It included a chart that showed a noticeable drop in Bitcoin transactions per second.
Cloudflare fell
Cloudflare posted a note on its website at 9:46 pm UTC on July 17, detailing the presence of a problem, as well as the entity’s investigation into the incident.
“This afternoon we saw an outage in some parts of our network,” Cloudflare noted in an update at 10:09 pm UTC. “It was not as a result of an attack.”
The update further explains:
“It appears that a router on our global backbone announced faulty routes and caused some parts of the network to be unavailable. We believe we have addressed the root cause and are now monitoring the systems for stability.”
At 10:57 pm UTC, a final update on the situation showed resolution.
The event raises a question about decentralization
The Bitcoin blockchain itself was not disrupted during the event. However, the event may have blocked many people from accessing Bitcoin, according to Lopp’s tweet. The outage affected many websites, including encryption services, meaning that users would likely not be able to access their funds held on those services during the outage.
The Cloudflare problem and the subsequent drop in transactions observed by Lopp may indicate that a considerable number of encryption users heavily use centralized storage and exchange options, making the space less decentralized than the ideals and technology on the ones that built the industry. Also, despite crypto participants using several different services, the outage removed many of those services with a single point of failure – Cloudflare.
