Ethereum’s ‘Unannounced Hard Fork’ Was Trying to Prevent the Very Disruption It Caused

Infura went down around 8:00 UTC Wednesday, and with it, some of Ethereum’s most popular applications like Metamask, MakerDAO, Uniswap, Compound and MyCrypto, among others. Shortly after, Binance halted Ethereum trading after noticing conflicting transactions on its Ethereum node. As other exchanges suspended trading as well, the real issue became clear: A bug in the Go Ethereum (Geth) client, whose code underpins 80% of Ethereum’s applications, had split the Ethereum blockchain in two.