Cloudflare goes down again; outage cripples major cryptocurrency platforms

Parts of the cryptocurrency world came to a grinding halt after Cloudflare, a CDN provider, was crippled by an outage. The outage, reported to have happened at 10:00 am ET, affected several popular websites, including several cryptocurrency-related platforms such as Coinbase and Poloniex. The outage follows a similar episode that happened with Cloudflare a few days ago.

Cloudflare is a popular service provider used by many websites to speed up data and media delivery services online. The outage affected not just trading services across the crypto-world, but also automatic pricing systems put in place by several websites, platforms and exchanges. Cryptocurrency pricing aggregator, CoinMarketCap, was among the websites so affected, going down briefly until the Cloudflare issue was resolved.

While no long-term resources were adversely affected by the Cloudflare exchange, several platforms found it careful to assure users of the safety and security of their cryptocurrency funds. Poloniex was one of them, with the popular exchange tweeting,

“Due to technical issues with our of our partners, Poloniex is currently unavailable for trading. We are working with our partner to resolve these issues as quickly as possible. All funds are safe, and we will keep you updated here.”

However, some questions really need to be answered. Especially in light of the fact that this is the second Cloudflare outage in a week. While a few minutes of outage may not have long-lasting damage, repeated and lengthier episodes of the same may hinder trading services considerably.

The last Cloudflare outage had hit several crypto-platforms as well, with Coinbase, CMC, HitBTC and Indian crypto-exchange, WazirX, among the ones affected by it. An investigation into the episode revealed that a potential route leak which affected some of its IP ranges was responsible for the outage. And while that episode was resolved within two hours by fixing the responsible network, repeated outages such as this may be worrisome for several platforms that have been investing in Cloudflare’s services.