- Ethereum layer 2 solution Arbitrum had a brief downtime on Friday.
- The update revealed that the surge in inscriptions has contributed to a surge in network traffic and gas bills.
- Arbitrum has since “resolved this problem,” with operations returning to normal and gas prices steadily recovering.
Ethereum’s rollup chain, Arbitrum, is operating normally after a brief outage on Friday.
The layer 2 Ethereum scaling solution faced a network outage of just over an hour on December 15th. An update posted to X’s official Arbitrum Foundation account noted that the outage occurred after a spike in inscriptions caused an outage in the Arbitrum One Sequencer.
Arbitration operations have returned to normal.
According to details shared with the community, Arbitrum One Sequencer and Feed went down at approximately 10:29 AM ET. The technical failure led to a significant surge in network traffic and, inevitably, a surge in transaction fees.
Arbitrum One Sequencer went down at 10:29 AM ET during a significant surge in network traffic.
We are working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible, and will conduct a follow-up inspection as soon as possible.
More details here: https://t.co/NBlzFuPFro
— Referee (💙, ) (@referee) December 15, 2023
The platform has not yet provided a full post-mortem on the temporary outage, but initial investigation suggests that an increase in inscriptions triggered an error in the sequencer. Here is the team’s initial report:
“Arbitrum One Sequencer is operational after a temporary outage that started at 10:29 AM ET and resumed at 11:57 AM ET. Although the team is actively investigating, the continued spike in inscriptions confirms that the sequencer has properly stopped relaying transactions..”
Cryptocurrency analyst Cygaar noted in a comment to This overwhelmed the network’s sequencer, creating a massive transaction backlog and causing gas fees to skyrocket.
Arbitrum Outage and High Ethereum Gas Prices Summary:
– People are spamming inscription deals on Arbitrum. This is a transaction that submits some hexadecimal data on-chain (mainly images and metadata).
– My guess is that this is overpowering the sequencer itself and interfering with the L2… pic.twitter.com/deJn4yVsT1
– Cigar (@0xcygaar) December 15, 2023
In a later update, the Arbitrum team said:
“Arbitrum One’s gas prices stabilized and operations returned to normal. We are continuing to gather more information and will provide a full postmortem in the coming days..”