A seven-hour Sequencer outage prohibited transactions from being executed for the duration of the outage, however everything is back up and running as of the time of publishing.
Arbitrum, the Ethereum layer-two network, has had its second outage in less than five months as a result of a hardware issue.
Arbitrum is operational again as of this writing, however the team did experience some outage on Jan. 9 in the late hours. According to the timing of the tweets, the network was offline for almost seven hours.
At the time, Offchain Labs said that it was having sequencer difficulties, which prohibited transactions from being completed for the duration of the outage.
Arbitrum provided a post mortem on Jan. 10 detailing the events leading up to the short outage. “At the heart of the problem was a hardware failure in our primary Sequencer node,” it said, adding that backup Sequencer redundancy that would typically assume over also failed owing to an ongoing software upgrade.
When the network’s own Sequencer fails, it is meant to fall back to layer-one Ethereum to execute transactions. However, it noted that attempts were taken to ensure that the Sequencer validated all transactions prior to going down. A total of 284 transactions were blocked from being pushed to the Ethereum chain as a result of the Sequencer’s capture.
Although this was a very modest outage in the big scope of things, the team reminded customers that the network is still in its infancy.
“The Arbitrum network is still in beta, and we will continue to refer to it as such as long as there are still places of centralization in the system.”
The team stated that it was working on further decentralising the network via the deployment of a “two-pronged approach to decreasing Sequencer downtime” in the following weeks and months.
In mid-September, Arbitrum had a similar Sequencer outage due to a flaw that led the system to get stuck after the execution of a large batch of transactions in a short period of time.
Arbitrum is a layer-two Ethereum network that uses optimistic rollups to batch transactions for quicker and more efficient processing. Arbitrum One was launched in early September after a $120 million investment round.
Arbitrum is now the most popular layer-two network, according to layer-two statistics platform L2beat, with a total value locked of $2.57 billion, giving it a 47 percent L2 market share.
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