Polygon network hits a snag

Polygon experienced a brief interruption in reaching consensus finality due to a bug affecting its Bor and Erigon nodes, causing major disruptions to RPC services and validator syncing.

This was after reports dated September 10th revealed that Polygon delayed attaining its consensus finality. The problem was identified earlier in the day after the bug disrupted several Remote Procedure Call (RPC) services that were actively running. This, in turn, brought about access problems on apps developed on the network.

Meanwhile, although the blockchain kept running and actively developing new blocks in its system, several RPC providers and validators mentioned that they were required to go back to the last finalized block and resync. 

Polygon’s bug incident causes tension in the crypto ecosystem 

The Polygon team confirmed the situation as the news about the network encountering a bug hit headlines. It acknowledged that the bug was disrupting the progress for specific node configurations. 

To address this problem, the team took several measures and restarted the affected nodes. This resolved a section of the problem based on feedback from some affected users. In a statement, the network admitted that restarting nodes is an effective way to fix issues raised for many validators and RPC providers.

In the meantime, engineers have expressed their strong commitment to join forces with infrastructure providers to accelerate debugging processes and restore the networks’ full functionality. 

To ease user tension, the Polygon team stated that the bug did not affect core chain operations. They then vowed to address issues raised by the incident as soon as possible.

When reporters contacted Polygon Labs for comments on the incident, they declined to respond.

Polygon encounters a Heimdall bug in its network 

As earlier reported by Cryptopolitan, Polygon’s recent bug incident is not the first it has encountered. In July this year, it encountered a similar scenario whereby its network experienced a temporary interruption caused by a bug in Heimdall, the network’s validation layer.

The Heimdall system runs validators, maintains consensus, and links to the Ethereum mainchain. Heimdall, named after a prominent god in Norse mythology, is one of the two primary layers of the Polygon PoS network, alongside Bor, which produces blocks.

The problem was noticed when the network progress halted for more than an hour. The Bor layer, however, did not encounter any problem and continued developing blocks as usual.

The team shared an X post, which was later deleted, stating that the validator’s exit greatly affected Heimdall’s functionality. They later replaced the deleted post with an informative post, but did not explain the root cause of the problem in detail.

When asked to comment on the situation, a Polygon Foundation representative told reporters that they were dedicated together with network participants to restore all the services affected due to this Heimdall bug.  

The bug caused MATIC, Polygon’s POL token, to be affected in terms of ranking in market capitalization, as it was ranked 66th and experienced a price decline of 2% trading at around $0.21 that day.

Interestingly, this sudden network disruption was encountered just after a significant network upgrade that Sandeep Naiwal, Polygon founder and CEO, referred to as one of the most technically complex in its history. This upgrade was initiated to accelerate transaction finality processes and update Heimdall to a new version of the Cosmos SDK.

At the beginning of 2023, Polygonscan also suffered a similar incident, temporarily showing zero blocks even though the network was still running. This incident prompted Polygon Labs to adopt a more proactive approach in communicating the distinction between explorer performance and the actual health of the blockchain.

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