Network traffic surge stalls Arbitrum One

At press time, the Arbitrum One network had been down for over 60 minutes due to sequencer and feed issues

According to the network’s status page, Arbitrum, a top Ethereum scaling solution, experienced downtime on Dec. 15. The dashboard classified the incident as a “major outage”, noting that a probe was underway to discover the root cause and deploy a fix

The Arbitrum One Sequencer and Feed stalled at 10:29 a.m. 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

Arbitrum status update

Arbitrum’s layer-2 network had processed over 22.29 million transactions, according to l2beat before the halt, and boasted a total value locked of $2.3 billion DefiLlama data.

The L2 scaling blockchain settles on-chain transactions off Ethereum’s mainnet, offering cheaper gas fees and aiming to decongest defi’s largest blockchain.

Arbitrum blocks stall | Source: ArbiscanThis is not the first time Arbitrum has stalled. In June 2023, defi’s largest L2 network came to a standstill for over an hour due to a bug in its sequencer. The issue caused Arbitrum’s sequencer to revert batches on-chain, eventually draining the sequencer of Ether (ETH). Developers manually topped up the sequencer, fixed the bug, and returned the L2 network to normalcy.