Arbitrum, a layer-two network of Ethereum, was temporarily out of service for at least seven hours, thanks to a hardware problem in the Arbitrum network’s sequencer—which delayed crypto transactions in the process.
To update users about the temporary outage of its network’s sequencer hardware failure, Arbitrum tweeted what happened.
“We’re currently experiencing Sequencer downtime. Thank you for your patience as we work to restore it. All funds in the system are safe, and will post updates here.”
According to collected data from Arbiscan (a tracker for Arbitrum blockchain) and Off-chain Labs (a platform that Arbitrum is built on), block 4509808 was the last to be processed on the network before going dark for close to seven hours.
Failure blamed on Sequencer node
The Arbitrum network boasts approximately $2.5 billion worth of digital assets.
Since its official launch, the network has attracted several high-end DeFi protocols, including Uniswap Protocol and Balancer AMM Protocol.
Compared to other networks, the Arbitrum network processes cryptocurrency transactions at higher speeds and much lower costs—sending crypto transactions in the form of call data to the Ethereum mainnet.
Arbitrum network was officially unveiled in September last year, through a successful round of crypto funding that raised approximately $120 million.
In a Medium blog post, the Arbitrum team yesterday explained why the network was temporarily out of service for nearly seven hours.
In part of the blog post, Arbitrum exclaimed that … “the core issue [of the outage] 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 the process.”
Arbitrum network still in the “beta phase”
The team also claimed the outage was due to the Arbitrum network being on the “beta phase”. They later assured users that they’ll minimize the hardware failures causing outages, and make Arbitrum a fully decentralized network in the future.
In part, the administrators also stated that …
“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. In the coming days, weeks, and months, we will continue on these two-fold paths of minimizing sequencer downtime and at the same time achieving the ultimate goal of full decentralization”.
The network’s latest outage was the second one in five months.
