Arbitrum’s Network Saw Minor Outages Because Of Hardware Failure

Arbitrum’s network saw minor outages due to a hardware failure which prevented transactions from being processed but at the time of writing, all is operational again as we are reading more today in our latest blockchain news.

The Ethereum layer-two Arbitrum’s network suffered a second outage in less than five months after a hardware failure. Arbitrum is now back online at the time of writing but the team reproted a slight downtime during the late hours of January 9. The timing of the tweets suggests that the network was down for about seven hours and the reports from Off-chain Labs reported that it was experiencing issues with a sequence that prevented transactions from being processed for the time being. Arbitrum released a post mortem saying what had occurred and what caused the brief outage. The reports show that the main issue was a hardware failure in the Sequencer node and revealed that adding backup Sequencer redundancies that normally take control, also failed because of the ongoing software update.

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

The network is designed to fall back to a layer-one Ethereum to process transactions when it has its own Sequencer issues. It stated that these efforts were made to make sure the transactions were confirmed by the Sequencer before they went offline. 284 transactions captured by the Sequencer were prevented from being posted on the Ethereum chain. This was actually a very small outage but the team did remind users that the network is still in beta mode:

“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.”

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.

— Arbitrum (@arbitrum) January 9, 2022

The team concluded that it was working on further decentralizing the network in a twofold path of minimizing Sequencer downtime which will be deployed in the upcoming weeks and months. Arbitrum suffered a similar Sequencer outage when the bug caused the system to get stuck in a large batch of transactions which was executed over a short period of time. Arbitrum is a layer-two Ethereum network that is using Optimistic rollups to batch transactions for faster and cheaper processing. It was launched as Arbitrum One in September following a huge $120 million funding round. As per the layer-two data platform L2 Beat, Arbitrum is the most popular layer-two network with a total value locked of $2.57 billion giving its L2 market share of 47%.