Binance briefly pauses Ethereum withdrawals as network suffers 'minor hard-fork'

The Ethereum network has suffered what looks like a hard fork today as reports emerged of outages and irregularities on infrastructure providers Infura and Blockchair.

While initially it was believed to be an internal issue in Infura, a hosting service used by some exchanges and service providers to interact with the Ethereum network, independent node operators have reported issues as well.

The exchange has since resumed withdrawals as of 10:20 am UTC. Blockchair, a popular block explorer, reported a discrepancy between the blocks it saw and those published by Etherscan.

An image published by the team shows at least 14 blocks mined on a minority chain, which seems to indicate that some miners suffered from the issue as well.

As developers attempted to triage the issue, Peter Szilagyi, lead for major Ethereum node software Geth, hinted that the first action should be to upgrade to the newest release.

In a conversation with Cointelegraph, Blockchair development lead Nikita Zhavoronkov said, "It seems that a minor hard fork occurred without anyone noticing it."

According to him, developers "Broke something in the latest releases," which led to a consensus issue and an unplanned hard fork.

Szilagyi put a different spin to the issue, saying that the new release "Fixed a consensus bug."

Either way, two parts of the network were unable to talk to each other, which caused significant - albeit temporary - issues.

Update: Binance resumed withdrawals at 10:30 am UTC..