The blockchain infrastructure provider Infura is facing an unexpected outage that forced multiple crypto exchanges, including Binance and Bithumb, to suspend ETH and ERC-20 token withdrawals briefly.
At 08:12 UTC on Wednesday, Infura’s Ethreum Mainnet API faced a ‘’ that created anomalies in the data feed of some of the top Ethereum-based platforms. Many exchanges and wallets halted their Ethereum service Infura being their default service provider.
Binance CEO Chanpheng Zhao suspected a possible chain split in the Etehreum blockchain as Etherscan and Blockchair were showing two different chains and data after block number 11234873.
There was a possible ETH chain split at block 11234873. Etherscan and Blockchair are showing two different chains and data after this block. We’re resolving now but have temporarily closed withdrawals. Funds are .
eg,
— CZ Binance (@cz_binance)
A few miners also seem to be affected by the issue as at least 14 blocks of Ethereum were mined on the minority chain.
‘Unannounced Hard Fork’
In a little less than two hours, Infra identified the root cause of the issue and updated that it was due to an older version of a major Ethereum node software, Geth.
“The root cause was traced to several components within our infrastructure which were locked to an older stable version of the go-ethereum client which encountered a critical consensus bug at block 11234873,” Infura stated.
Blockchair’s lead developer, Nikita Zhavoronkov explained that that “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).”
He called it an ‘unannounced ‘ and pointed out that the Bitcoin network faced a similar incident seven years ago.
“This affected several Geth versions including 1.9.9 and 1.9.13. Components running 1.9.19 and later were unaffected,” Infura added.
Meanwhile, resumed its affected withdrawals at 10:28 UTC.
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