Thomas Daniels
At the time of reporting, the Arbitrum One network had been experiencing an outage for more than 60 minutes due to problems with its sequencer and data feed. According to the network’s status page, Arbitrum, a prominent Ethereum scaling solution, faced downtime on December 15th. The dashboard categorized this incident as a “major outage” and mentioned that an investigation was underway to identify the root cause and implement a solution.
The interruption occurred at 10:29 a.m. Eastern Time when there was a significant increase in network traffic, causing the Arbitrum One Sequencer and Feed to become unresponsive. We are actively working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible and will provide a detailed analysis of the situation in the near future.
Arbitrum’s layer-2 network had successfully processed more than 22.29 million transactions, as reported by l2beat, before the disruption. Additionally, it had a total locked value of $2.3 billion, according to DefiLlama data.
Arbitrum’s layer-2 scaling blockchain handles off-chain transactions, reducing Ethereum’s mainnet gas fees and aiming to alleviate congestion on the largest blockchain in the DeFi space.
It’s worth noting that this is not the first time Arbitrum has experienced such an interruption. In June 2023, the largest DeFi layer-2 network encountered a similar issue, where it came to a halt for over an hour due to a bug in its sequencer. This bug caused Arbitrum’s sequencer to revert on-chain batches, ultimately depleting its Ether (ETH) reserves. Developers manually replenished the sequencer, fixed the bug, and restored the L2 network to normal operation.
