Cloudflare Outage Disrupts Crypto Exchanges and DeFi Platforms

A global Cloudflare outage crippled access to major cryptocurrency exchanges including Coinbase and Kraken, exposing the fragility of internet infrastructure that underpins digital asset markets. The disruption also affected Solana-based protocols and decentralized finance applications, leaving traders unable to execute orders during critical market hours.

Cloudflare's security update—intended to patch a React Server Components vulnerability—ironically became the single point of failure that blocked legitimate traffic alongside its routine blocking of 400 billion AI bot requests. The incident highlights the tension between robust web protection and maintaining uninterrupted access for financial platforms where downtime translates directly to monetary losses.

As error messages proliferated across social media, the outage revealed how centralized web infrastructure contradicts crypto's decentralized ethos. Monitoring tools themselves went dark, creating a recursive visibility blackout that compounded the problem for operations teams scrambling to diagnose issues.