Nike faces $5 million lawsuit after Cloudflare outage temporarily wipes its NFT images

What just happened? On the morning of April 24, thousands of digital images tied to Nike's high-profile CloneX NFT collection disappeared from the internet, replaced by a stark message: "This content has been restricted. Using Cloudflare's basic service in this manner is a violation of the Terms of Service." For collectors, the sudden blackout was a jarring reminder that even blockchain-backed digital assets can be alarmingly fragile when their underlying infrastructure fails. The disruption was not the result of a hack or a blockchain malfunction, but rather a mundane technical issue. The images for the CloneX NFTs – avatars created by RTFKT, a digital fashion studio Nike acquired in 2021 – were hosted off-chain on Cloudflare's servers. When Cloudflare prematurely downgraded RTFKT's account to a free plan before the contract's scheduled end, the service restricted access to the images, citing a violation of its terms for high-bandwidth content. As a result, more than 19,000 NFTs wer ... Read full article.