MetaMask, Ethereum Apps Down as Infura Suffers Outage

Ethereum isn’t down this morning, but to users of popular wallet MetaMask and other decentralized apps (dapps) built on the top smart-contract blockchain network, it might seem like it. That’s because the widely used infrastructure service Infura is suffering an outage, which is impacting an array of apps and services built on Ethereum.

Problems began popping up earlier this morning as users reported issues accessing Ethereum applications, particularly with MetaMask, which counts more than 30 million monthly users.

According to an update on the Infura status page as of 13:43 UTC, the infrastructure provider identified issues with many of its APIs, which connect apps and services to the Ethereum blockchain. The affected APIs included those for Ethereum as well as scaling solutions like Polygon, Optimism, and Arbitrum, as well as Filecoin and NFT protocol Palm.

As of 15:08 UTC, Infura said that it was working on deploying a solution. “​​We are in the process of rolling out a fix and our core systems are starting to recover,” the status page reads. “Full service functionality will be reestablished as remaining components come back online.”

When asked for comment or additional information on the issues, an Infura representative told Decrypt, “Unfortunately we don't have any more details to share at this point since our engineers are hard at work on a fix.”

On social media, Ethereum users shared complaints, with one NFT collector writing, “Just started my morning with a nice little panic attack.” Project creators likewise shared the news, including Ethereum NFT collection The Sevens, which tweeted that its current NFT mint was “disabled” due to Infura issues.

While Ethereum is the leading platform for dapps, NFT trading, and DeFi (the trading and borrowing of crypto assets without third-party intermediaries), the decentralized ecosystem still largely relies on some common infrastructure.

That’s why when a service like Infura goes down, the impact can be especially pronounced and touch many of the most popular Ethereum apps and services. Infura previously encountered a major outage in November 2020, which it described in a postmortem as the “most severe service interruption in our four years of operation.”