Cloudflare Outage Shuts Down Major Crypto Platforms and Exposes Web3’s Hidden Weaknesses

On November 18, 2025, the internet experienced a major disruption when Cloudflare, one of the world’s largest web infrastructure providers went down. The outage affected a wide range of services, but the crypto industry felt the impact especially sharply. Exchanges, block explorers, and DeFi dashboards displayed error messages for hours. Users could not check balances, track transactions, or even log in on some platforms. Meanwhile, the blockchains behind these services continued to operate normally.

The event served as a powerful reminder of the gap between blockchain decentralization and the centralized systems most crypto platforms still rely on for everyday access.

How the Outage Started and Spread

Cloudflare later confirmed that the root of the issue was a software failure inside one of its security systems. A configuration file used by its Bot Management tool grew far larger than engineers expected. This caused memory failures across many of Cloudflare’s edge servers. The company explained that the problem was not a cyberattack. Instead, a quiet system change linked to database permissions allowed the file to grow uncontrollably until it pushed parts of their network into repeated crashes. Because Cloudflare operates a massive global edge network, the issue spread quickly, affecting websites and applications across industries.

Crypto Platforms Hit Hardest

As the outage unfolded, large sections of the crypto ecosystem went offline. Users saw “500 Internal Server Error” or blank loading screens on major services, including:

• DeFi dashboards such as DefiLlama
• Popular block explorers, including Arbiscan
• Major exchanges like BitMEX and Kraken

These platforms depend on Cloudflare for essential functions such as content delivery, API routing, and protection from malicious traffic. Once Cloudflare’s system failed, their public-facing websites became unreachable, even though trading engines, order books, and blockchains continued to work behind the scenes. Cloudflare’s internal dashboard also crashed, making it difficult for platform operators to diagnose or respond to the situation in real time.

The first signs of trouble appeared around 11:20 UTC. Over the next three hours, users worldwide reported outages. By 14:30 UTC, Cloudflare deployed a fix. Twelve minutes later, the company announced that the issue had been resolved and network stability restored. Most crypto platforms came back online shortly afterward, though some experienced lingering errors as caches refreshed.

Even though blockchains are designed to be decentralized, the websites and apps people use to interact with them often rely on centralized services like Cloudflare. Because of this, when Cloudflare experienced problems, many Web3 platforms went offline at the same time. The blockchain itself never stopped working, it continued processing transactions normally, but most users couldn’t see what was happening or use their wallets and dashboards during the outage.

Some platforms were completely stuck because they didn’t have backup systems. Without a second DNS provider or an alternative content delivery network, their services stayed unavailable until Cloudflare recovered. The platforms that came back online faster were the ones that had multiple providers or backup access routes ready to go. This difference shows which teams have invested in strong, resilient infrastructure and which ones rely too heavily on a single company.

As expected, critics didn’t miss the chance to point out the irony of the crypto world relying so much on centralized services.

Jameson Lopp, the Chief Security Officer at Casa, joked on X that “Cloudflare is having issues this morning, so half of the internet is down.” He went on to say,“We took an amazing decentralized technology and made it fragile by putting most services behind just a few providers.”

The crypto company Shapeshift responded with a playful comment of its own, saying, “Our app working smoothly. Decentralization good.”

Cloudflare’s outage became another clear example of how even a technology built on decentralization can run into trouble when too many important tools depend on a single centralized point of failure.

For many users, this incident was a wake-up call. Just because the blockchain is decentralized doesn’t mean the access points are. A network can be fully active, but if its website or API depends on a centralized provider, the user experience can still fail. This situation raises important questions about how Web3 tools should be built in the future and what real resilience truly means.

The November 2025 Cloudflare outage made one thing clear, a decentralized future cannot rely on centralized foundations. As the crypto ecosystem grows, real progress will come from building access points that are as resilient and distributed as the blockchains behind them. As Web3 continues to expand, do you think the industry will prioritize true decentralization in its infrastructure, or will convenience keep platforms dependent on centralized providers?