Coinbase’s Base Network Halts Block Production for Nearly 30 Minutes

Base — Coinbase’s Layer 2 network built on Ethereum — suffered a brief outage early Monday morning, breaking a long stretch of nearly uninterrupted uptime since the network went live in 2023.

The network halted block production at 06:15 UTC on Aug. 5, 2025, per data from the Base Status page. The outage lasted roughly 29 minutes before recovery was confirmed at 06:44 UTC.

The network’s status page flagged the issue as an “unsafe head delay.” As of press time, the page states that the “issue’s been identified and fixed, we're now monitoring to ensure nothing else comes up.”

The outage occurred just weeks after Base launched a new feature that lets on-chain apps show transaction statuses almost instantly to improve responsiveness. Called Flashblocks and built by Flashbots, the feature uses “preconfirmation blocks,” which are small sub-blocks created every 200 milliseconds by the block builder.

It’s not clear if the update is connected to the outage.

"We experienced a brief outage due to an unexpected issue during an automated system switch. Things are back up now, and we’re close to a long-term fix," a spokesperson for Base told The Defiant.

The latest incident is Base’s second major technical outage. The first occurred on Sept. 5, 2023, when block production paused for about 43 to 45 minutes. Engineers later revealed in an X post that the issue was due to internal infrastructure “requiring a refresh” and confirmed that no funds were at risk.

At the time, Matt Willemsen, director of research at Collective Shift, an Australian crypto education platform, pointed out in an X post that Ethereum-based Layer 2 chains differ from Ethereum mainnet, which is “more battle-tested and involves fewer trust assumptions.”