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The Ethereum blockchain network looks to be suffering issues Wednesday morning, with knock-on effects at related service providers [updated].
- 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.
- 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.
