Starknet, an Ethereum layer-2 protocol, experienced a block reorganization that resulted in a backlog of transactions. Starkscan, the protocol’s block monitoring tool, displayed a four-hour outage in block production.
On April 4, there was a gap between the creation of blocks 630028 and 630029, as shown by Starkscan’s block monitor. However, Starknet’s status page did not indicate any outages on the network on the same day.
In response, Starknet issued a statement on X, explaining that a rounding error bug caused the block reorganization. Although block production continued as usual, the reorganization led to a transaction backlog that prevented the network from operating at full capacity.
According to the statement, “Consequently, there were a few minutes during which new transactions could not be accepted for processing and were therefore rejected. Moreover, some transactions were reverted due to changing parameters (e.g., timestamps).”
Cointelegraph reached out to Starknet for further details regarding the incident and whether block production was halted, but no additional information was provided.
Starknet’s status page last reported a major outage on March 13 during Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade.
This recent outage is just one of many setbacks experienced by major blockchain networks in the ecosystem. Solana, for example, encountered a significant outage in early February 2024, which halted the network’s block progression for over five hours.
This was not the first time Solana experienced downtime, as it has had multiple significant outages and partial or major outage days since January 2022.
Anza, a software development firm focused on Solana, released a postmortem report of the February 9 outage. The report revealed a bug in Solana’s Just-in-Time (JIT) compilation cache, which compiles all programs before executing a transaction.
According to Austin Federa, head of strategy at the Solana Foundation, a process was underway to replace the old loader system with a new motor system. However, the old instruction set was still present in the codebase and someone intentionally called it, causing issues with the JIT compiler.
Solana faced problems again in early April, with nearly 75% of all transactions on the network failing due to bot activities related to memecoin trading.
Analysts suggest that these failed transactions are primarily a result of bot-driven arbitrage trading.
In other news, Ethereum’s ERC-20 design flaws have been identified as a crypto scammer’s best friend, according to a magazine article.