Minor Outage in the Arbitrum network due to Hardware failure

• Arbitrum experienced a shutdown in its system for seven hours.
• This was the second shutdown in less than five months.
• The team said that it is planning to decentralize it, which is currently run by Offchain labs.

Arbitrum, a layer two network for Ethereum, has suffered a brownout for around seven hours. This is the second time something like this has happened in less than five months.

As for now, Arbitrum is back online. But during the late hours of Jan 9, the team reported some downtime in the network. The fact that the network was down for around seven hours was suggested by the timing of the tweets. It was reported by the Offchain Labs platform that there were some issues with the Sequencer, which was preventing the completion of the transactions. 

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According to the tweet by Arbitrum which said that they are currently experiencing Sequencer downtime, and they thanked people for being patient while they were working on its restoration. And that all the funds are safe, and they’ll keep them posted through the tweets. 

On the successive day, Arbitrum published an article explaining about the shutdown, giving details about it and how the team managed to solve it. It also said that the main issue was in their main Sequencer node when a hardware failure took place. And even the backup Sequencer couldn’t take control and failed because there was a software update going on.

Although the network is designed to go through permanent Sequencer failures, it can still fall back to the layer one ethereum to process the transactions. And it stated that they made efforts to make sure about the confirmation of all the transactions by the Sequencer before it went offline. The Sequencer captured 284 transactions that were prevented from getting posted on the Ethereum chain. And that after the system was restored, firstly, these transactions were confirmed, then the new transactions were accepted.

This was a minor shutdown in the dynamic network. The explainer also said that the Arbitrum network is still in Beta and that they will keep this Moniker till there is an existence of points of centralization in the system.  

The Arbitrum team concluded that it’s working towards further decentralization of the network with the ‘twofold path of minimizing Sequencer downtime.’ that is going to be brought into action in the upcoming weeks and months. 

In the last five months, this was the second brownout that Arbitrum suffered. The first one occurred in the mid of September, and it was a similar Sequencer outage that was caused because the system got stuck due to a bug after a large bunch of transactions were executed over a short frame of time. 

Arbitrum is said to be the most prominent Layer two network as of now and has a total value of $2.57 billion locked.