The Ethereum Layer 2 solution Base has released a report detailing two network outages that occurred on June 25 and 26. The outages were caused by a bug in the sequencer's logic.
https://twitter.com/buildonbase/status/2070896671349948442
After a failed transaction, the mechanism incorrectly saved the internal state of the system, ultimately creating an invalid block.
The first incident lasted 116 minutes, while the second lasted 20 minutes. During this time, the network stopped producing new blocks, transactions were not recorded on the blockchain, and the queue of unconfirmed operations became overloaded, causing users to receive errors when attempting to send new transactions.
However, the team emphasized that user funds were not affected and remained secure.
What Happened
According to the report, the issue arose after one transaction failed. The sequencer did not clear the journal state, resulting in the next valid transaction receiving an incorrect fee calculation. This led to the formation of a block with an invalid state transition, which other nodes in the network could not accept. Consequently, block production came to a complete halt.
After implementing a fix, developers encountered a second issue: a race condition during the restart of the sequencer cluster hindered nodes from quickly synchronizing. This problem caused a shorter, subsequent outage the following day.
What Changes Base Will Implement
Following the incidents, the Base team promised to enhance stress testing and fuzzing of the protocol to proactively identify unusual transaction processing scenarios.
Additionally, developers plan to improve network monitoring and implement a graceful recovery mechanism, which will allow the network to return to operation more quickly after similar outages.
As a reminder, in February, the Base team announced its transition from the Optimism tech stack to its own unified network architecture.