Infura has suffered a major outage leading to the temporary stalling of its services this morning.
As of now, there has been no public statement from the company confirming the same and the steps taken by it to counter it.
Temporary suspension of services
Infura, known to be an Ethereum service provider and maintained by Consensys, has suffered a major setback this morning. It has apparently experienced an outage that has temporarily blocked other services and organizations from seeing the network’s data proving that having a single point of failure can be exceedingly stressful.
As per the reports, the bug affected Geth, a major portion of the entire ecosystem. The Ethereum Foundation team lead Péter Szilágyi, also confirmed that the version has been dormant for the last 2 years. Following this, it has come under criticism that while other nodes have been updating regularly, Inffura kept running without installing the required updates. With this service outage, the Ethereum network suffered a temporary hard fork splitting into two and running parallel blockchains with different data. In a tweet Szilágyi said:
“Technically…it was an “unannounced hard fork” (from a bad chain to the good one). That said, silently fixing a bug dormant for 2+ years has a much lower chance of causing a disruption than raising awareness to it. We strive to minimize potential damage.”
Solutions are underway
Ethereum developers have already started deploying a solution that would not let the activity convert into malicious outcomes later on. As of now, no public statements from Infura have been forthcoming.
Nikita Zhavoronkov, the lead Ethereum developer at Blockchair, has an opinion:
“In my opinion, today’s consensus failure in #EthereumUnicorn’s face shouldn’t be underestimated and should be considered as the most serious issue Ethereum has faced since the DAO debacle 4 years ago. An investigation is in order.”
He referred to Ethereum’s DAO hack in 2016 when the network was newly established and the users lost more than $50 million at that time. This mess-up has given several Ethereum critics a chance to further criticize the network and called it technologically insufficient. But overall markets seemed unaffected by this major blow.
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