- Team members reported the main Sequencer node hardware failure.
- 284 transactions were caught by the Sequencer.
Arbitrum, Ethereum’s most popular Layer 2 solution today, has over $2.5 billion in total value locked up. While numerous Ethereum DeFi protocols, like Balancer and Uniswap, have already joined the mainnet since its August 2021 debut, more are anticipated to follow.
Yesterday, due to a Sequencer failure, transactions could not be completed for seven hours. The Ethereum layer-two network, Arbitrum, had its second outage in less than five months due to a hardware malfunction. The Arbitrum One chain’s last block before the outage struck, according to Arbiscan and Offchain Labs data, was 4509808 and processed at 10:29:22 UTC on January 9.
The Arbitrum team said:
“The Sequencer is back online. Thank you very much for patiently bearing with us as we resolved the issue. More details about what occurred to follow.”
Undergoing Testing and Still in Beta Phase
In a subsequent post on January 10, they explained the issues that caused the outage. Team members reported the main Sequencer node hardware failure. In the event of a Sequencer failure, the network will fall back to processing transactions using layer-one Ethereum. Though attempts were taken to ensure the Sequencer validated all transactions before going down.
The Sequencer caught 284 transactions that should have been added to the Ethereum chain. Although there was a brief hiccup, the team warned users that the network is currently undergoing testing and is still in the beta phase.
In September, a defect caused a Sequencer outage similar to this one, when the system became stuck after processing huge transactions in a short amount of time.
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