Polygon zkEVM Resumes Operations After Outage

On March 23, the Ethereum Layer 2 network Polygon zkEVM experienced a disruption, causing the blockchain, launched about a year ago, to halt for over 10 hours.

Polygon zkEVM Mainnnet Beta faced an issue with its sequencer due to an L1 reorg. We are working on fully resolving the issue and will follow up with a detailed post-mortem.

This only impacts Polygon zkEVM (which is the only rollup) and does not impact Polygon PoS, Polygon CDK,…

— Polygon | Aggregated (@0xPolygon) March 23, 2024

“The Polygon zkEVM Mainnet Beta encountered a sequencer issue due to an L1 reorganization,” the team reported.

Resolving the issue required activating an emergency mode, allowing developers to implement necessary fixes to resume interaction with the first layer.

Polygon zkEVM Mainnet Beta has resumed operations.

The Emergency Council for Polygon zkEVM Mainnet Beta activated the emergency state to allow the Polygon zkEVM Core Team to apply a necessary fix to the system, allowing L1 settlement of Polygon zkEVM Mainnet Beta to resume. Upon…

— Polygon | Aggregated (@0xPolygon) March 25, 2024

The prolonged blockchain delay affected only Polygon zkEVM and did not impact the main Polygon PoS network or any others deployed using Polygon CDK.

Following the incident, the emergency mode was deactivated. This means all protocol updates will activate with the usual 10-day delay, the team noted. They plan to present the results of the incident investigation this week.

Polygon zkEVM was launched on March 27, 2023, with the first symbolic transaction by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. The network employs a rollup architecture with zero-knowledge proof technology.

Polygon has great tech. We shouldn’t let a sequencer failure sour any reputation. It happens, bugs happen, it’s early tech.

I’m sure Fuel will experience similar events in our development, it’s just an unfortunate but necessary part of the learning process.

All the power to…

— nick.sway (@IAmNickDodson) March 24, 2024

“Polygon has great solutions. We shouldn’t let a sequencer failure tarnish any reputation. It happens, bugs happen, it’s early technology,” commented Nick Dodson, CEO and co-founder of Fuel Labs.

He suggested that their modular blockchain Fuel, based on Optimistic Rollups, might face similar issues. The mainnet launch is expected in the third quarter.

In February, Polygon Labs laid off 19% of its team. The company stated this was not due to financial difficulties.