Base identified sequencer failure as responsible for the interruption of the network

By Hannah Pérez

Base developers published a post mortem report with the details of the problem caused by the interruption of the network on Tuesday. The fault caused Base to pause block production for more than 30 minutes.

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Base developers published a post mortem report on this week’s problem.
Base was more than 30 minutes without producing new blocks due to a sequencer failure.
The sequencer was delayed due to the high congestion of the base network.
The team has now taken measures so that this type of incident is not repeated.

The developers of Base They identified a sequencer failure as responsible for interruption of the network, which completely paused block production for about 30 minutes on Tuesday.

In a report Post mortemthe team said that the problem of layer 2 incubated by Coinbase It originated when the active sequencer, responsible for organizing and processing transactions in the Blockchainwas delayed due to high network congestion.

Base initially reported the incident at 06:15 UTC, when it experienced a delay that affected deposits, withdrawals, block production and Flashblocks on the main network, according to the official status website of the Network. Little more than 25 minutes later, the developers said they were investigating the fault, and at 9:17 UTC announced that the incident had been resolved.

Base stopped 30 minutes: What happened?

According to the report, the interruption was caused by the delay of the active sequencer due to the high activity of the network.

To avoid prolonged interruptions, Base It operates a cluster of support sequencers managed by the driver, a component designed to guarantee the continuity of the service. However, when the driver tried to transfer control to a backup sequencer, he was not fully prepared, since he was still in the process of configuration, which prevented block production.

Since the backup sequencer did not have enabled the ability to start another automatic change, the network was stagnant. At 6:09 UTC, the monitoring systems alerted the technical team, which shortly after the incident declared.

The engineers assured in the report that intervened manually, pausing the driver to avoid additional problems, such as a possible reorganization of the chain that could alter confirmed transactions. At 6:40 UTC, after transferring control to an operational sequencer, the network recovered completely, resuming normal block production.

Impact and context

The 33 -minute interruption highlighted the challenges of layer 2 networks that depend on centralized sequencers to process transactions. Although these solutions offer faster speed and lower costs compared to layer block chains 1 such as Ethereumincidents as this highlights the risks of failures in critical points of the system.

The event occurred at a time of high activity in Basedriven by NFT tokens and minting releases, which probably contributed to the initial congestion.

Last month, Coinbase He relaunted his app Wallet under the name of Base, with Zora and FARCASTER incorporatedwhich led to An increase in network activity. This increase was reflected In the number of new releases of Tokensthat during July only 6,649 the first day of the month to approximately 50,000 at the end of the month, he noticed The Block.

From its debut in 2023, Base has accumulated USD $ 4,156 million in total locked value (TVL), according to data from Defillwhich reflects its enormous growth and current dominant paper between L2 of Ethereum.

Response and future measures

In response to the incident, the team of Base He has announced that he will implement improvements in his infrastructure to ensure that any sequencer added to the cluster is fully prepared to assume control in case of being selected. In addition, exhaustive tests will be carried out to validate these corrections and prevent similar incidents.

This is not the first problem of this type in chains based on the OP Stackwhich underlines the importance of these updates. For Base, This was the first interruption since September 2023, according to the media.

Article written with the help of AI, by Hannah Pérez / Diariobitcoin

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