Infura, the infrastructure provider of Ethereum, is down.
This is revealed by the status.infura.io website itself, where it says that the main cause of the problem has been identified, and they are working on correcting it to restore the functionality of the service as soon as possible.
The problem remains unresolved for now, and the infrastructure is still offline.
This causes a service interruption for Infura’s Ethereum Mainnet API, which in turn causes several cascading problems.
In fact, it produces for example a delay in the feed of the prices of ETH and the ERC-20 tokens, so much that some crypto exchanges have decided to temporarily block Ethereum withdrawals (but not for other blockchains like Bitcoin for example).
MetaMask is also experiencing difficulties because it uses Infura as its default service provider, since both MetaMask and Infura are owned by ConsenSys.
Even Binance’s CEO, Changpeng CZ Zhao, has revealed that a possible separation of the Ethereum blockchain at block 11234873 has been found, with Etherscan and Blockchair showing different data in subsequent blocks.
The curious thing is that the price of ETH seems to be little affected by this problem, as it only went from $460 to $456 and then went up to $457.
Infura is down, but the Ethereum blockchain remains operative
After all, blocks continue to be mined, albeit with relatively few transactions.
In fact, when looking at the Ethereum blockchain, there is no sign of any crash, but only a slight slowdown.
However, this problem raises the question of the real decentralization of Ethereum. Although Infura’s infrastructure does not appear to be a single-point-of-failure, given that the network is still functioning, the fact that it creates problems means that Ethereum partly depends on individual infrastructures that are able to cause problems, albeit temporary and not able to bring down the entire network.
The more decentralized a network is, the fewer problems like this one will cause disruption on a large scale.
