Arbitrum says network back to normal after brief outage

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.”