Hardware Failure Behind Arbitrum’s Second Outage In Five Months

Ethereum Layer-2 network Arbitrum suffered a seven-hour outage preventing transactions from being completed. This is Arbitrum’s second outage in five months but is currently back online at the time of writing. The cause of the downtime was pinpointed as a sequencer outage. 

Network Down For Seven Hours 

While Arbitrum is currently back online, the team at the layer-2 network had reported the outage on January 9th, with the timing of the tweet suggesting that the outage lasted for seven hours or so. It was reported that there were issues with the Sequencer, which was preventing transactions from being completed. 

Arbitrum tweeted out about the outage at the time, stating, 

“We are currently experiencing Sequencer downtime. Thank you for your patience as we work to restore it. All funds in the system are safe, and we will post updates here.”

Arbitrum Downtime, What Exactly Happened? 

The following day, Arbitrum published an explainer about the outage, detailing what caused the outage and explaining how the team fixed the outage. The post also stated that the issue was completely resolved, with the public RPC nodes and the Arbitrum Sequencer fully operational. It also clarified that Arbitrum’s network could sustain even permanent Sequencer failures, falling back to Ethereum for transactions. 

“The core issue was a hardware failure in our main Sequencer node. While we generally have redundancies that would allow a backup Sequencer to seamlessly take control, these also failed to take effect this morning due to a software upgrade in process. As a result, the Sequencer stopped processing new transactions. We’d like to stress that Arbitrum is a Layer 2 network on Ethereum, and the network is designed to sustain even permanent Sequencer failures by falling back to using Ethereum to process transactions.”

Arbitrum also clarified in the post that it made all efforts to ensure that the Sequencer confirmed all transactions before it went offline, with a grand total of 284 transactions captured by the Sequencer prevented from going over to the Ethereum chain. 

A Minor Outage, And A Reminder That The Network Is Still In Beta 

Arbitrum’s team assured users that the outage was minor but also stressed on the fact that the network was still in beta. 

“The Arbitrum network is still in beta, and we will keep this moniker as long as there are points of centralization that still exist in the system.”

The team also stated that it was further decentralizing the network, adopting a two-fold path that would ensure minimal Sequencer downtime. This approach would be gradually deployed over the next few months. 

Arbitrum’s Previous Outage 

The January 9th outage was Arbitrum’s second outage in five months. The network had suffered a similar outage in September, again caused due to a Sequencer outage. A bug in the network resulted in the system being stuck after a large batch of transactions was executed. 

Arbitrum is one of the most popular Layer-2 solutions and has a total locked value of $2.57 billion. 

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.