Infura, a hosted Ethereum node cluster that allows users to run applications without the need of an individual node or wallet, is experiencing downtime, at the time of writing.
The infrastructure provider noted that it was experiencing a service outage that was causing a delay in the price feed to update for the Ethereum and other ERC-20 tokens.
Source: Infura
This has caused many exchanges to disable the withdrawals of Ethereum and ERC-20 tokens. CryptoQuant.com noted:
“It seems exchanges using #Infura suspend withdrawing $ETH and #ERC20 tokens. For example, the largest exchange #Upbit was not hacked. Their outflow looks normal.
When #Upbit was hacked in Nov 2019, the outflow skyrocketed before the withdrawal limits.”
Binance’s CEO noted some discrepancies and stated that there was a possible ETH chain split at block 11234873. He added:
“Etherscan and Blockchair are showing two different chains and data after this block. We’re resolving now but have temporarily closed withdrawals.”
However, this was a result of the outage faced by Infura, and various components across Ethereum have been impacted – including Ethereum Mainnet archive data, Mainnet filters, Mainnet logs, Mainnet WebSocket JSON-RPC API, and Mainnet HTTPS JSON-RPC API.
It is possible that exchanges do run their own Ethereum nodes, but suspend some services pending an investigation if the local chain does not reconcile to a third party provider such as Infurahttps://t.co/FCC7sOA1cN
— BitMEX Research (@BitMEXResearch) November 11, 2020
As per the latest update, Infura has identified the root cause of the problem and is currently working on it to resume functionality.
According to Blockchair Lead Developer, Nikita Zhavoronkov Ethereum developers introduced a change in the code, and companies like Blockchair and Infura were unaware of this. This caused the companies to be stuck on the minority chain, causing confusion among the masses about a possible chain split. Zhavoronkov added:
“Technically, that was an unannounced hard fork. Something similar happened to #Bitcoin 7 years ago when there was a database upgrade”
According to Binance’s latest update, the exchange has now resumed ERc20 tokens deposit and withdrawals.
Infura provided an update regarding the issue and they noted:
“The root cause was traced to several components within our infrastructure which were locked to an older stable version of the go-ethereum client which encountered a critical consensus bug at block 11234873. This affected several Geth versions including 1.9.9 and 1.9.13. Components running 1.9.19 and later were unaffected. “
