Layer 2 blockchain network Arbitrum suffered a partial outage of service on Friday morning (ET) after a traffic jump on the platform caused its sequencer and feed to stall.
In a note on its website, the platform said that the sequencer and feed were operational again and that it was working to fix technical issues.
“The Arbitrum One Sequencer and Feed stalled at 10:29 AM ET during a significant surge in network traffic,” Arbitrum said in its statement, adding: “The Sequencer and Feed are back up, though we are aware of the technical issue causing high transaction fees and are working to resolve this as quickly as possible. We will provide a post-mortem as soon as possible.”
Sequencers are connectors, between layer 2 networks like Arbitrum and Optimistic and decentralized mainnets such as Ethereum. They help to determine the order in which transactions occur on these networks. But they have also proven vulnerabilities.
Arbitrum suffered an outage in June because of a bug in its sequencer. That bug stemmed from a large “backlog of transactions which hadn’t been posted on-chain,” Arbitrum Foundation’s community lead wrote at the time.
Friday’s outage created problems throughout the Arbitrum community, including the cancellation of an event on Twitter spaces (now X). “Today’s stream has been postponed, sorry for the inconvenience Arbinauts!” Arbitrum wrote in an X post.
Today's stream has been postponed, sorry for the inconvenience Arbinauts!💙🧡
— Arbitrum (💙,🧡) (@arbitrum) December 15, 2023