The Ethereum-compatible layer 2 protocol StarkNet is currently facing an outage, with the blockchain network halting block production at 4:36 AM UTC.
According to data from Voyager, the block explorer for StarkNet, the last block confirmed on the network was at the height of 1961878. Data shows that no new block has been produced since the past three hours and all transactions have stopped processing.
Confirming the issue, StarkNet’s official X handle shared a post, citing that the team was investigating the outage and working to resolve the issue. “Our team is actively investigating the issue and working to restore full functionality as quickly as possible,” the post read, “We’ll share updates as soon as we know more.”
The outage occurred just a day after StarkNet introduced a new upgrade, Grinta, on its blockchain infrastructure. This upgrade was focused on distributing sequencer architecture, replacing its single sequencer with 3 running Tendermint consensus.
As per DeFiLlama data, StarkNet has over $121 million in total value locked (TVL), with it being one of the largest Ethereum layer 2 networks.
The outage has sparked widespread criticism from users, especially on the edge of such drastic changes on the layer 2 network’s fundamental design.
At the time of publication, the reason behind the downtime was not confirmed.
Blockchain Downtimes
This is not the first time a blockchain network is facing an outage. Similar incidents have happened a number of times on multiple blockchains. Notably, Solana has been at the center of outages in past years where it has seen significant downtime multiple times due to technical errors.
A recent example includes Coinbase’s Base, which witnessed a 33 minute outage last month due to a sequencer handoff failure.
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