- Ethereum layer 2 solution Arbitrum had a brief downtime on Friday.
- An update showed a surge in inscriptions had contributed to the spike in network traffic and gas fees.
- Arbitrum has since “resolved this issue,” with operations back to normal and gas prices steadily recovering.
Arbitrum, a rollup chain on Ethereum, is running normally after a brief downtime on Friday.
The layer 2 Ethereum scaling solution faced a little more than one hour network outage on December 15. An update posted on the official Arbitrum Foundation account on X noted that the outage happened after a surge in inscriptions triggered a stall in the Arbitrum One Sequencer.
Arbitrum operations back to normal
According to details shared with the community, the Arbitrum One Sequencer and Feed stalled approximately at 10:29 AM ET. The technical hitch led to a significant surge in network traffic and inevitably a spike in transaction fees.
The Arbitrum One Sequencer stalled at 10:29 AM ET during a significant surge in network traffic.
We are working to resolve as quickly as possible and will provide a post-mortem as soon as possible.
More details here: https://t.co/NBlzFuPFro
— Arbitrum (,) (@arbitrum) December 15, 2023
While the platform has yet to provide a full post-mortem of the temporary outage, initial investigations show that rising inscriptions triggered the Sequencer’s failure. Here’s the team’s initial report.
“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 properly.”
Crypto analyst cygaar noted in a comment on X that its possible people had spammed the layer 2 chain with inscriptions. These overwhelmed the network’s sequencer, creating a huge backlog of transactions and skyrocketing the gas fees.
Summary of the Arbitrum outage and high Ethereum gas prices:
– People are spamming inscription transactions on Arbitrum. These are transactions that submit some hex data on-chain (images and metadata mostly).
– My guess is this overwhelmed the sequencer itself, preventing L2… pic.twitter.com/deJn4yVsT1
— cygaar (@0xCygaar) December 15, 2023
In a later update, the Arbitrum team said:
“Gas prices on Arbitrum One have stabilized and operations are back to normal. We’re continuing to gather more information and will provide a full post-mortem in the coming days.”
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