Ethereum Layer-2 Chain Arbitrum Suffers Near Hour-Long Outage

Arbitrum experienced what its team is describing as an “outage” this morning, according to a Tweet posted by its main account at 10:43 AM New York time. The downtime happened to coincide with a similar loss of performance on the Solana blockchain.

Arbitrum is an optimistic roll-up chain built to support the Ethereum blockchain, developed by Offchain Labs. It currently has $1.8B worth of assets locked up in different smart contracts on the chain, according to DefiLlama.

At 11:31 AM the Offchain team tweeted that the chain was “fully restored.”

The outage was a temporary failure of one component of the system, which did not put funds at risk, Offchain Labs said in a statement.

“The root cause of the downtime was a bug causing the Sequencer to get stuck when it received a very large burst of transactions in a short period of time. The issue has been identified and a fix has been deployed,” the statement said.

Arbitrum’s Sequencer is an optional component of chain that enables very swift finality for transactions.

“As we noted in our launch announcement, we do want to caution users that further outages are possible in these early days,” the statement said.

Subscribe for free for daily DeFi news delivered straight to your inbox:

New Chain

The mainnet chain, called Arbitrum One, only went live on Aug. 31.

Arbitrum has quickly become a contender among layer-2 solutions for Ethereum. Some of the best projects in decentralized finance have already announced plans to build there. The decentralized exchange, Curve, opened up on Arbitrum on Monday. The portfolio management tool, Instadapp, also announced it now works on the L2 this week. MakerDAO is working on bringing DAI there.Another decentralized exchange, SushiSwap, went live on Arbitrum the day after the L2 went to mainnet.