Critical Etherum services go down for couple of hours

An issue arising in the early hours of 11th November 2020 with one of the most used APIs for an instant & scaleable access to the Etherum blockchain provided by Infura & Blockchair have suffered an outage leading to users reporting MetaMask glitching out and also many big exchanges such as Binance, Crypto.com and Bithumb stopping withdrawals with immediate effect.

As of 08:00 UTC the Infura team has noticed a service outage with their service responsible for integrations with Etherum Mainnet API and has started investigating and working on resolving the issue.
The spotlight was also cast on Blockchair after CZ Binance has communicated of temporarily closing withdrawals on Binance's Etherum based tokens and higlighting that there could have been a potential chain split at block 11234873 causing the issue.
The issue is thought by some to be effectively an unannounced hard fork caused by Etherum's code change, inevitably leading to a split of chain.

After two hours into the issue the Infura team has communicated that they are aware of the root cause causing issue and are into applying a fix to resolve it, with Blockchair being almost complete by this time and CZ Binance communicating that the withdrawals have been resumed minutes later.
With MetaMask using Infura API by default many users are still reporting issues with the application not working properly coming into third hour of the its services being down, with the status update being available through https://status.infura.io/
As an alternative whilst Infura is still down users of MetaMask have the ability to switch the default provider from Infura to a different node provider.

Critical Etherum services go down for couple of hours

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