OpenSea confirms outage after platforms report issues with displaying NFTs

An outage affected the API of NFT marketplace OpenSea, it has been confirmed. The outage is said to cause issues for multiple sites that use it to display NFTs. 

An OpenSea spokesperson mentioned that the outage happened at 6:05 am (local time) and the outage was resolved by 8:30 am, reported ZDNet. However, according to the status update page of OpenSea, the outage was long carried out, with programmatic access to the API being fully restored by about 3:30 pm. 

Initially, OpenSea told ZDNet that their platform team was immediately entrusted to identify and fix the issue. "We know how important a reliable site with minimal downtime is to our community, and are working quickly to address this area in a number of ways, including expanding our engineering team to more than 200 people by the end of this year, re-architecting OpenSea for scale, and reducing our customer support times significantly," the OpenSea spokesperson said.  

OpenSea CEO Devin Finzer pointed out the challenges that the platform has been facing over the last few months, in a blog post. 

“I recognise that the impact of OpenSea downtime is significant for many of you who depend on our platform. We take accountability for the recent instabilities – and I wanted to personally apologise, explain, and outline our plans to prevent this from affecting you in the future,” Finzer said.

“Improving site reliability has been a priority for some time (in fact, it’s one of the focus areas I mentioned in our recent funding announcement). We were a team of just seven people at the start of 2021, and as NFTs took off last year, we had to scale fast. That kind of scale comes with growing pains, which many of you have experienced firsthand,” he added.