On March 10, The Polygon Network went offline which has created panic among crypto investors for almost 11 hours, until it’s safely restored back.
Polygon developers unveiled the truth behind this terrific network error. The reason behind the network down was a planned network upgrade-the Heimdall node.
The Heimdall upgrade is performed by one of the two layers of the network’s proof-of-stake chain. The team confirmed that the network was not operational between 5:50 PM UTC on March 10th until about 4 AM UTC on March 11th.
The team also pointed out the potential of a “bug” in the upgrade, which had manipulated the consensus and drove different validators to be on different versions of the blockchain. This has excluded them from reaching the ⅔ consensus mechanism.
The Heimdall up-gradation is not linked or controlled user transactions as it is used for validator-related bridging and transactions.
Also, the team revealed that Bor chain, a proof-of-stake chain of Polygon was also paused because it relies on Heimdall for “block proposer committee selection.”
As per the latest update, at 4 AM UTC on March 11, the team has successfully deployed a hotfix to restore operation on the network. However, the Bridge will “not be active until we fully resolve the issue.”
“We appreciate your support during this time and have an update: we have deployed a temporary hotfix to unblock the Bor chain and resume producing blocks on the Polygon chain.” While this solution is temporary, the team is working on implementing a longer-term upgrade to fix the Heimdall issue.
In January, the Solana blockchain network also suffered downtime due to network congestion because of the heavy number of duplicate transactions executed by bots.
