Cloudflare Outage Hits Crypto Platforms: Coinbase, Kraken Disrupted

- Major crypto platforms experienced outages during a Cloudflare incident. - The event highlights vulnerabilities in centralized cloud infrastructure. On November 18, 2025, The Block reported that a widespread Cloudflare network outage disrupted cryptocurrency platforms and Web2 services. Popular crypto exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken faced significant disruptions, while the blockchain explorer Etherscan and DeFi lending platform Aave also went down. In addition, the outage affected data provider DeFiLlama and Elon Musk’s X platform, with users encountering intermittent "500 Internal Server Error" pages. Cloudflare acknowledged the outage on its status page at approximately 11:48 a.m. UTC, attributing the issue to an "internal service degradation." While the company indicated a fix was underway, it did not provide specific details on the root cause. The outage coincided with maintenance at multiple Cloudflare data centers, although the company did not confirm a direct connection. This event follows previous Cloudflare outages that caused major service interruptions for crypto exchanges in June 2022 and July 2019. Furthermore, an AWS outage in October also disrupted platforms like Coinbase and MetaMask. These incidents underscore the vulnerabilities of centralized infrastructure within the digital asset ecosystem. On November 18, David Schwed, Chief Operating Officer of SovereignAI, emphasized the gravity of the situation, stating, “With Cloudflare down today and AWS just a few weeks ago, it's evident we can't simply outsource resiliency in our infrastructure to a single vendor.” Schwed urged the industry to prioritize building infrastructure capable of enduring such outages and described an overreliance on vendor-driven restoration as "pure negligence." Following the incident, Cloudflare’s shares fell by 3.5% during pre-market trading, reflecting market concerns over the company’s reliability as a service provider. In the crypto markets, as of 15:08 UTC on November 18, Ethereum (ETH) was trading at $3,067.084, with its 24-hour trading volume decreasing by 2.625%. Aave (AAVE) was trading at $172.467, with its 24-hour trading volume down by 3.058%.