Starknet, an Ethereum layer-2 protocol, experienced a block reorganization that resulted in a backlog of transactions. The protocol’s block monitoring tool, Starkscan, showed a four-hour outage in block production. On April 4, there was a gap between the creation of blocks 630028 and 630029, although Starknet’s status page did not indicate any outages on the network. Starkscan’s block monitor also displayed the four-hour gap between blocks 630028 and 630029.
Following the incident, Starknet released a statement explaining that a rounding error bug caused the block reorganization. While block production continued as usual, the reorganization led to a transaction backlog, preventing the protocol from operating at full capacity. Some transactions were rejected during a few minutes when new transactions could not be processed, and others were reverted due to changes in parameters such as timestamps.
Cointelegraph reached out to Starknet for further details, but additional information regarding the incident and whether block production was halted has not been provided.
Starknet’s status page last reported a major outage on March 13 during Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade, which resulted in slow block creation.
Starknet’s recent outage is part of a series of issues faced by major blockchain networks in the ecosystem. Solana, for example, experienced a significant outage in early February 2024, with block production downtime causing a halt in the network’s progress for over five hours. This was not the first time Solana encountered such problems, as it has experienced multiple significant and partial outages since January 2022.
Anza, a software development firm focused on Solana, released a postmortem report on the February 9 outage, revealing that a bug in Solana’s Just-in-Time (JIT) compilation cache caused the issue. The JIT compilation cache encountered problems while compiling programs before executing transactions.
In early April, Solana faced further problems as approximately 75% of all transactions on the network failed due to increased activity related to the memecoin mania. Analysts suggest that these failed transactions were primarily caused by bot activities on Solana, which were attempting arbitrage trades.
In a separate context, it has been highlighted that Ethereum’s ERC-20 design flaws can be exploited by crypto scammers.