Arbitrum Faces Continued Block Production Halt
The Twitter community on the evening of December 15th discovered that Arbitrum encountered an issue and was unable to produce blocks for nearly one hour.
Arbitrum Faces Continued Block Production Halt
Update as of the morning of December 16th, 2023:
Arbitrum has provided an official update early on December 16th, attributing the incident to Inscriptions—a trend "rampant" across various blockchains like BNB Chain, Fantom, Avalanche, and TON in recent weeks—which caused a surge in transactions on Arbitrum and network congestion.
The issue has now been resolved, and Arbitrum has resumed block production and transaction processing normally.
The Arbitrum One sequencer is up and running after a temporary outage starting at 10:29 AM EST and resuming at 11:57 AM EST.
The team is actively investigating, but we can confirm that a sustained surge of inscriptions triggered the sequencer to stop relaying transactions…
— Arbitrum (?,?) (@arbitrum) December 15, 2023
Blockchain data indicates that 90% of transactions on Arbitrum prior to the incident were related to Inscriptions.
Original Article:
Accounts quickly shared information about Arbitrum's incident. Naturally, key opinion leaders (KOLs) who support Solana (an ecosystem previously ridiculed for chain stoppages) were among the quickest to spread this information.
According to the transaction data tracking browser Arbiscan, the latest block on Arbitrum with sequence number 160384180 occurred nearly an hour ago.
This is not the first time Arbitrum has faced block production issues. The first mention of Arbitrum encountering block production halts was in September 2021.
In addition, Layer-2 has experienced other issues related to network operations. Recently, in August 2023, Arbitrum had issues with managing ETH balances in fee-paying wallets, which prevented the network from processing transactions for an hour. In January 2022, Arbitrum faced connectivity issues from the Sequencer network.
However, there has been no official announcement from the project team regarding this phenomenon. Previously, a similar phenomenon occurred with BNB Chain. However, at that time, the transaction volume was so high that browsers could not display real-time data, leading to misunderstandings as mentioned above.
