Major crypto exchanges lose millions because of the Cloudflare outage

Updated on: 22 June 2022

Jurgita Lapienytė
Chief Editor

Computer screen showing different cryptocurrencies trading

Some of the biggest crypto exchanges were down for more than an hour on Tuesday, which resulted in hefty losses.

Cloudflare's outage on Tuesday affected major global services, including crypto trading platforms.

Cloudflare has confirmed that the issue was a technical glitch of the highest critical rating, causing the service network to be disrupted in "broad regions," – suggesting that the outage likely affected apps and sites worldwide.

According to the cybersecurity company disBalancer, crypto exchanges that suffered the longest downtime were Gate.io (1h 20 min), AscendEX (1h 20 min), Coinbase (1h 19 min), OKX (1h 19 min), Blockchain.com (1h 19 min), Crypto.com (1h 17 min).

The largest losses in trading volume among the 10 largest crypto exchanges were detected on Coinbase ($109,083,180), OKX ($93,475,456), Gate.io ($77,789,159). The company noted that trading volume data is volatile, so estimates are approximate.

"It was not the first time Cloudflare outages caused the downtime of popular apps and web resources. Earlier, Cloudflare rebuffed Ukraine's request to cease operations with Russian clients. Given this situation, the true causes of the Cloudflare outage remain unknown," disBalancer said.

Recently, a report by insurance firm Parametrix said that investors are calling for the cryptocurrency industry to start reimbursing them when things go wrong.

Nine-tenths told Parametrix that they would like to see platforms compensate them for outages that prevent them from accessing their accounts. And six in ten respondents who had never invested said they might if such measures were adopted.