Arbitrum suffers ‘partial outage’ amid traffic influx

A “significant surge in traffic” resulted in a “partial outage” of the Ethereum-based layer-2 network Arbitrum on Friday.

The problem involved Arbitrum’s sequencer. Sequencers are key components of layer-2 networks, serving to process and order transactions in blocks that are then added to the core network — in this case, Ethereum.

The outage has lasted nearly two hours, according to Arbitrum’s status page. “We are working to resolve as quickly as possible and will provide a post-mortem as soon as possible,” the team wrote in a post on X.

Arbitrum’s sequencer suffered a two-hour outage in early June, as Blockworks previously reported. That outage was the result of a software bug, developers said at the time. 

Arbitrum is Ethereum’s largest layer-2 network, encompassing $2.34 billion in total value locked (TVL) and roughly $720 million in transaction volumes over the past day, according to DefiLlama data. 

Layer-2 networks like Arbitrum are designed to offload some transaction volume off the main chain. 

This is a developing story.

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