- Ethereum layer-2 solution Arbitrum experienced a brief service interruption on Friday.
- An update indicated a surge in inscription transactions contributed to increased network traffic and higher gas fees.
- Arbitrum has since resolved the issue; operations have returned to normal and gas prices are gradually recovering.
Arbitrum, an Ethereum rollup chain, is operating normally following a short outage on Friday.
The layer-2 scaling solution suffered a network interruption that lasted just over an hour on December 15. An update posted on the official Arbitrum Foundation account on X (formerly Twitter) stated the outage began after a surge in inscriptions caused the Arbitrum One sequencer to stall.
Arbitrum operations back to normal
According to information shared with the community, the Arbitrum One sequencer and feed stalled at approximately 10:29 AM ET. This technical issue produced a large spike in network traffic and, consequently, a rise 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 a full post-mortem has not yet been published, early investigations indicate that a sustained increase in inscription activity caused the sequencer to stop relaying transactions correctly. The team provided the following initial summary:
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 commented on X that the platform may have been targeted by users submitting large numbers of inscription transactions. These transactions—typically containing hex-encoded data such as images or metadata—overwhelmed the sequencer, producing a backlog and driving gas prices higher.
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 subsequent status update, the Arbitrum team confirmed:
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.