On Wednesday morning, the Ethereum blockchain appears to be having connectivity issues with the respective service providers.
- In a service announcement shortly after 08:00 UTC, Ethereum infrastructure provider Infura stated that it had an outage for the Ethereum mainnet API and is investigating the issue.
- Infura provides API access to the Ethereum network for other applications and services.
- Due to the outage, some Infura users have suspended Ethereum services, including Metamask and Binance.
- While the situation is currently evolving rapidly and is far from clear, bugs in Infura can arise from problems with Ethereum itself.
- Binance and Blockchair tweeted shortly before the press release that the Ethereum blockchain may have been split.
- Blockchair added that the issue was fixed by updating Geth, an Ethereum client.
- "At some point, Ethereum developers made code changes that today caused the chain to split, starting at block 11234873 (07:08 UTC)," Nikita Zhavoronkov, Blockchair's lead developer, said on Twitter.
- Calling it "a technically undeclared hard fork," Zhavoronkov added that third-party services would need to be updated to resolve the issue.
- Speaking with CoinDesk, he said the changes may have been made months ago, leading to the split today.
- “Those who haven't updated their get-nodes for a while (I suppose, several months at least) split with those who had new get-nodes,” Zhavoronkov said, adding that the Infura outage is likely arose due to the same problem.
- According to CoinDesk, the price of the Ethereum cryptocurrency has not changed at the time of publication.
- This is sensational news and CoinDesk will provide updates as more information becomes available.
Updates:
10:28 UTC - Binance says it has restored Ethereum-based token services.
10:37 UTC - Infura says its team has "identified the root cause and is preparing a fix to restore service functionality."
10:41 UTC - clarifying information from Nikita Zhavoronkov has been added.