Metamask and Ethereum Dapps Services Down As Infura Faces Outage

Moments ago, reports emerged that Metamask and other Ethereum-based Dapps were inaccessible because of a service outage. The outage was caused by issues on APIs connecting Infura Network and Ethereum blockchain. It is not the first time Infura faced service outages leading to problems in Ethereum. 

Metamask, Dapps Services Down

Today, Metamask and other Dapps built on the Ethereum network were all down. Metamask is one of the largest Web 3 wallets, supporting DeFi tokens from Ethereum and BSC users. The wallet has about 30 million monthly users. Earlier today, the wallet services were down completely. 

According to reports, many decentralized applications also suffered a similar outage. For instance, other scaling solutions like Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, and, as well as Filecoin and NFT protocol Palm were affected. Indeed, this outage affected millions of ethereum customers.

The news making rounds indicate that this particular service outage was caused by another tool called Infura. Infura is a set of tools that allows developers to quickly build and link Dapps on the Ethereum blockchain. This Infura tool suffered an outage, causing a service outage for Metamask users and other Dapps.

Infura Network APIs Caused the Outage

According to reports earlier today, users began reporting problems accessing Metamask and other Ethereum-based applications. Ethereum users began to send their complaints, mostly posting them on social media platforms, especially Twitter. 

One NFT user tweeted, “Just started my morning with a nice little panic attack.” The complaints continued to flow in from investors, creators, and many other Ethereum Dapp stakeholders. 

The creator of an Ethereum-based NFT collection called The Sevens tweeted that their “Eve sale is currently disabled because of downtime at @infura_io API’s. If you are waiting to mint, check the status on their website. The sale should reopen automatically when all issues are fixed!”

Infura began to work to identify the problem causing the service outage. By afternoon today, they identified many issues with APIs. The APIs affected mainly connect Dapps to Ethereum blockchain.

Infura engineered started working on solutions to the problem, announcing that they are planning to roll out a fix, and the core systems are already starting to recover. They also mentioned that they would return to full functionality as they continue to fix the remaining components. 

It’s Not The First Time

In November 2020, Infura suffered its most significant service outage. The outage affected many projects, forcing Binance and other crypto exchanges to stop Ethereum and ERC20 token withdrawals.

Ethereum remains the most prominent Dapp host but depends on other common infrastructures. The dependent clause can cause security and service issues if the support infrastructures are unreliable. When a common infrastructure like Infura goes down, the impact is dire. However, Infura Engineers have promised to continue working hard for a lasting solution.