The Ethereum Arbitrum network experienced a second power outage in less than five months following a hardware failure.
As of this writing, Arbitrum is online again, but the team reported some downtime in the late hours of January 9. The timing of the tweets indicates that the network is down for about seven hours.
At the time, the Offchain Labs platform reported that it had some issues with the sequencer that prevented it from processing transactions during this time.
On January 10, Arbitrum released an autopsy showing what had happened and caused the temporary power outage. “The issue with the kernel was a hardware failure on our master sequencer node,” the post said, adding that the backup sequencers that would normally take over were also failing due to persistent software updates.
The network is designed to go back to Level 1 Ethereum for transaction processing when you encounter problems with the sequencer. However, it was mentioned that efforts have been made to ensure that all transactions are confirmed by the Sequencer before they go offline. A total of 284 transactions captured by Sequencer were not published on the Ethereum network.
This was a very small break from the big picture, but the team reminded users that the network is still in the beta testing phase.
“The Arbitrum Network is still in the beta testing phase and we will keep this mapping as long as there are central points in the system.”
The team concluded that it is decentralizing the network through a “two-step method for reducing sequencer downtime” that will be rolled out in the coming weeks and months.
In mid-September, Arbitrum experienced a similar sequencer crash where an error caused the system to crash after executing a large batch of transactions in a short period of time.
Related: Ethereum’s Lag Behind TVL Reaches All-Time High
Arbitrum is an Ethereum networking team that uses bullish summaries of aggregated transactions for faster and cheaper processing. It was launched as Arbitrum One in early September after a massive $120 million funding round.
According to team data platform L2beat, Arbitrum is currently the most popular team network with a total value of $2.57 billion, giving it a market share of 47% of L2.
