Ethereum Service Providers Experiencing Issues After Reported Blockchain Split
Ethereum Service Providers Experiencing Issues After Reported Blockchain Split
The Ethereum blockchain network looks to be suffering issues Wednesday morning, with knock-on effects at related service providers.
- In a service announcement soon after 08:00 UTC, Ethereum infrastructure provider Infura said it is experiencing a service outage for its Ethereum mainnet API and it was investigating the issue.
- Infura provides API access to the Ethereum network for other applications and services.
- The outage has prompted some Infura users to halt Ethereum-based services over the issue, including Metamask and Binance.
- While the situation is currently fast evolving and far from clear, the problems at Infura may stem from a problem with Ethereum itself.
- Binance and Blockchair tweeted soon before press time that there had possibly been a split in the Ethereum blockchain.
- Blockchair added that it had fixed the issue by upgrading Geth, an Ethereum client.
- “At some point Ethereum developers introduced a change in the code that led today to a chain split starting from block 11234873 (07:08 UTC),” said Nikita Zhavoronkov, lead developer at Blockchair, on Twitter.
- Calling it “technically an unannounced hard fork,” Zhavoronkov added that third-party services need to upgrade to fix the issue.
- Talking to CoinDesk, he said that the changes may have been made months ago that caused the split today.
- “Those who haven’t been upgrading their geth nodes for a while (I presume several months at least) got split with those with new geth versions,” Zhavoronkov said, adding Infura’s outage likely arose from the same issue.
- The price of Ethereum’s ether cryptocurrency is unaffected at press time, according to CoinDesk data.
- This is a breaking news story and CoinDesk will provide updates as more information becomes available.
- Updates:
- 10:28 UTC – Binance says it has reinstated services for Ethereum-based tokens.
- 10:37 UTC – Infura says its team has “identified the root cause and are preparing a fix to restore service functionality.”
- 10:41 UTC – added clarifying information from Nikita Zhavoronkov.
