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Internet services provider Cloudflare says that a fault in its bot detection system triggered an outage that took down around 20% of webpages, including several crypto platforms. Cloudflare <a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/18-november-2025-outage/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">said</a> in a post-mortem statement on Tuesday that a “feature file” used by its Bot Management System to fight off cyberattacks grew beyond its normal limit, leading to a failure in Cloudflare’s software.
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 “We are sorry for the impact to our customers and to the Internet in general. Given Cloudflare’s importance in the Internet ecosystem any outage of any of our systems is unacceptable.”
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The company initially suspected <a href="https://cointelegraph.com/news/cloudflare-outage-crypto-websites-social-media" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">the incident</a> was caused by a hyper-scale Distributed Denial of Service attack, but confirmed there was no cyberattack or malicious activity.
Cloudflare handles roughly 20% of internet traffic and powers around one-third of the top 10,000 websites, apps and services.
Its outage took out the websites for <a href="https://cointelegraph.com/news/dollar1t-crypto-market-drawdown-masks-bitcoin-s-strong-fundamentals-coinbase-exec" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Coinbase,</a> Blockchain.com, Ledger, <a href="https://cointelegraph.com/news/arthur-hayes-zcash-second-largest-holding-maelstrom" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">BitMEX,</a> Toncoin, Arbiscan, and DefiLlama, as well as X and ChatGPT, leading some crypto commentators to remark on the crypto industry’s reliance on centralized systems, some of which also went offline when Amazon Web Services suffered a <a href="https://cointelegraph.com/news/aws-outage-shows-crypto-decentralization-weakness" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">network outage</a> last month.&nbsp;
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 <img src="https://s3.cointelegraph.com/uploads/2025-11/019a9a5e-49b0-731e-b39e-ab5dc512e060" title="" alt="Cloudflare blames database error for outage that took down 20% of the internet">
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 Source: <a href="https://x.com/dabit3/status/1990791704744796402" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="https://x.com/dabit3/status/1990791704744796402">Nader Dabit</a>
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 A spokesperson for EthStorage, which offers a product allowing Ethereum to be used as a web server, told Cointelegraph that the AWS and Cloudflare outages show “centralized infrastructure will always create single points of failure.”
“A complete decentralized web stack is needed more than ever,” the company said.
Related: <a href="https://cointelegraph.com/news/building-the-personalized-internet-interview-with-xborg-ceo" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Building the ‘personalized’ internet: Interview with XBorg CEO</a>
<h2 id="vitalik-buterin-wants-decentralization-prioritized">Vitalik Buterin wants decentralization prioritized</h2>
Last Wednesday, Ethereum co-founder <a href="https://cointelegraph.com/news/vitalik-buterin-authors-signs-trustless-manifesto" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Vitalik Buterin</a> authored a “Trustless Manifesto,” which called on industry builders to never sacrifice decentralization in pursuit of adoption.
Buterin and <a href="https://cointelegraph.com/news/ethereum-foundation-grants-program-new-funding" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Ethereum Foundation</a> researchers Yoav Weiss and Marissa Posner, said crypto platforms sacrifice trustlessness from the moment that they integrate a hosted node or centralized relayer, explaining that while it feels harmless, each new checkpoint becomes a potential chokepoint.
Magazine: <a href="https://cointelegraph.com/magazine/2026-pragmatic-privacy-crypto-canton-zcash-ethereum-foundation/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">2026 is the year of pragmatic privacy in crypto: Canton, Zcash and more</a>

Cloudflare blames database error for outage that took down 20% of the internet

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Other articles published on Nov 19, 2025

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