Arbitrum L2 mainnet outage

An outage hit the Arbitrum mainnet, the Layer-2 scaling solution. The project team reported an error in the Sequencer smart contract, due to which the protocol stopped producing new blocks. Developers assured users that funds were safe.

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 (@arbitrum) January 9, 2022

According to Arbiscan, the most recent block (#4509808) at the time of writing was generated around 13:30 (MSK) — the protocol has not been operating for more than five hours.

The Sequencer smart contract has limited powers over the ordering of transactions. Because of this, user operations are registered immediately, before confirmation by the Ethereum blockchain. Transferring funds via this contract is optional, and network clients can bypass it.

Back in September 2021, Arbitrum experienced a 45-minute outage. At that time, the main cause of the incident was a Sequencer bug that received a very large batch of transactions in a short time.

After the incident, developers stated that this contract cannot steal funds or forge transactions, because every operation it processes bears the user’s digital signature, which is checked on the L2. They also warned of likely repeat outages, as Arbitrum One is still in beta.

Earlier, on January 6, Solana reported a decline in beta mainnet performance and warned users about possible errors in transaction processing.

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