Celo Network Plagued With Outages

Celo has been struggling with on-and-off network outages that lasted over a 24-hour span. 

Outage Halts Block Production For 9 Hours

For the first time since its mainnet launch in April 2020, the Celo blockchain suffered extensive network outages across a 24-hour period. The open-source blockchain runs on a Proof-of-Stake network and acts as a proxy payment server for users who want to make crypto payments using their phone numbers instead of public keys. The first outage occurred when the network stalled block production in the early hours of Thursday. The Celo team updated the public through a Twitter post about the outage while also assuring that all funds were uncompromised. According to the announcement, the protocol had stalled at 12.04 am UTC at block 14,035,019. The team also expressed that it had started a thorough and expedited technical analysis to get to the root of the problem. The outage lasted nine hours, during which the network could not validate new transactions. 

Second Outage Follows Soon

Even though the network resumed briefly, the second outage followed soon after as the blockchain process was halted at block 14,035,045. The team addressed the community again via a tweet, saying, 

“Validators are working to restart the network. Block production resumed briefly, however, stalled again. Validators, please join the validators-operators channel on Discord and follow the posted instructions to update your node. As previously stated, all funds are secure.”

Since then, the team has addressed the issue by upgrading the network validator nodes to version 1.5.8. and getting the network back to running again. After almost 24 hours since the first outage started, the team informed the community that the network was functioning.

Could Uniswp V3 Be Responsible? 

The team has not disclosed the reason or factors contributing to the outages. The fact that the sudden downtime occurred soon after the Uniswap V3 update seems significant. However, it is interesting to note that despite the outage on its network, the CELO token was not affected adversely and has gone up in price to $0.9 at the time of writing. 

Even though this was the first time the Celo Network suffered a complete network outage in the two years since its launch, the protocol has faced its share of technical issues. In November 2021, the Celo team had to address security issues that affected its bridge. Optics, which is Celo’s bridge with Ethereum and Polygon, was targeted by a critical security bug. The team had to swoop in and fix the situation by implementing an emergency upgrade. 

Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.