Cloudflare experienced a major outage that caused widespread service outages across thousands of websites and apps on Tuesday.
Several large centralized crypto services rely on Cloudflare to help with heavy traffic. BitMEX faced an outage, while there was also significant downtime for Toncoin, the blockchain linked to Telegram. But the disruption spread beyond cryptocurrencies, and platforms like X or ChatGPT also went down, affecting millions of people.
This episode comes just weeks after Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered an outage that prevented access to major blockchains, such as Coinbase’s Base chain, as well as Infura, which powers many blockchains.
Tuesday’s outage reignited conversation about the need to decentralize infrastructure to keep the Internet running.
“Today’s Cloudflare outage shows how vulnerable the digital economy has become. When a single provider experiences issues, the impact does not remain contained; it cascades across industries, affecting everything from social media platforms to e-commerce checkouts to backend payment services,” Fadl Mantash, chief information security officer at Tribe Payments, said in an email to CoinDesk.
“Payments are particularly exposed. The infrastructure behind a single transaction depends on a chain of cloud platforms, processors, third-party APIs, authentication tools and card schemes. When any link in that chain fails, the entire journey can break,” Mantash added.
Some in the cryptocurrency world have called for DePIN to be more widely adopted to combat these issues. DePIN, or Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks, uses blockchain incentives to coordinate and reward people for building and maintaining real-world infrastructure. This can be anything from wireless networks to sensors and power systems, the goal is not to depend on a central company. In this way, users contribute hardware or services and get tokens in return, creating an open, community-managed infrastructure layer.
One of the leaders driving this is the CEO of Gaimin, a DePIN project focused on cloud infrastructure delivery. Nökkvi Dan Ellidason said: “We must move to a truly distributed cloud model. By leveraging existing globally dispersed resources, such as underutilized PCs, Gaimin is building a network where capacity is distributed across regions and continents, making it difficult for a single error to destroy the entire global system.”
“This is the only way to safeguard the digital economy against the inevitable fragility of centralization,” added Dan Ellidason.
Read more: Cloudflare global outage extends to cryptocurrencies; Multiple fronts down
