Binance briefly freezes Ethereum withdrawal gate due to infrastructure problem

Major cryptocurrency exchange Binance has suspended Ethereum withdrawals as the network suffered a “minor hard fork.” While the original reason for the incident is believed to be because Ethereum infrastructure provider Infura shut down, independent node operators have reported problems as well. Infura acts as an infrastructure provider for Ethereum, offering services such as physical computing resources, data partitioning, security, and backup, among other services  Through the network, Dapp developers can quickly connect to the Ethereum Blockchain.

Infura reported an incident that caused exchanges to suspend withdrawals of ETH and ERC-20 tokens, including Binance and other major exchanges. Developers said that the cause has been identified and they are working on a fix. According to Blockchair, the problem can be fixed by upgrading Ethereum's Geth to the latest version, as there is a high chance that incompatibility has occurred between the nodes, resulting in operational interruptions and data fabrication on the Ethereum network.

Speaking about the incident, Blockchair development lead Nikita Zhavoronkov commented, “it seems that a minor hard fork occurred without anyone noticing it.” An unplanned hard fork and a consensus problem came from the lack of latest releases’ update and the new version, “fixed a consensus bug.” In any case, the bridge was temporarily broken, causing considerable disconnections between two parts of the network.