Layer-2 of Ethereum, Arbitrum network, has experienced a brief outage which affected transactions being restricted from further processing.
Hardware malfunction is one of the main causes that made Arbitrum experience a short outage on the 9th of January. This is the second disruption during the last five months that this network has faced.
After seven hours of brownout, Arbitrum managed to be back online. During the time that Arbitrum was down, a report from the Offchain Labs platform gave us insight into the issues they were facing with the sequencer. This blocked the operation of transactions and further processes regarding the purchases.
We are currently experiencing Sequencer downtime. Thank you for your patience as we work to restore it. All funds in the system are safe, and we will post updates here.
— Arbitrum (@arbitrum) January 9, 2022
In addition to this, Arbitrum took the problem they were facing at the time to Twitter, in relation to the Sequencer downtime. Further, the network explained the cause of the short outage, which was a hardware malfunction in the main Sequencer node in Medium. Moreover, in these cases of failure, the backup Sequencer would typically take control over the place, unfortunately, this time the backup also failed because of some software update that was happening at that time.
The Arbitrum Network’s Design Regarding Sequencer Issues
The network is able to face the possible Sequencer issues that may occur during a specific period of time. The robust design of the Arbitrum involves the fall back to Layer-1 Ethereum when Sequencer problems are developing. This enables the desirable transactions to continue their processing. Despite this, the network claims that more than 284 transactions failed to execute on the Ethereum chain while the Sequencer was offline. Although there were efforts to verify all the transactions before going offline, the network failed to achieve this goal.
On the other hand, the team reminded the users that the network is still in the beta phase. They claim that they will keep working towards decentralization as they improve their project.
Additionally, the team noted for the audience that they were focusing on improving and establishing a twofold path of minimizing Sequencer downtime. This update could deploy in the next weeks.
Back in September, Arbitrum went through its first outage due to a bug regarding some large transactions and volume. Similar to now, this outage made the system get stuck.
Regardless of the issues that Arbitrum has been experiencing recently, it is currently known as the most popular Layer-two network, reaching the equivalent locked value at roughly $2.57 billion, while achieving a 47% share of the L2 market overall.
The goal of Arbitrum is to make the high amount of transactions processed faster and cheaper using Optimistic rollups. Following a major $120 million fundraising round, Arbitrum One made its debut in early September.
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