Ethereum Layer-2 blockchain Base, which powers Coinbase, experienced a 33-minute block production outage today, Tuesday, caused by the misconfiguration of a failover system.
It arose at 6:07 a.m. UTC when the primary sequencer started falling behind and an automatic shift of activity to a backup one that was not operational.
Backup System Error Disrupts Block Production
The network also employs a management tool called the Conductor that redirects traffic to backup sequencers in case of disruption. Nevertheless, the Conductor erroneously gave control to a sequencer that was still in development. It was not ready to do live transactions, and hence, block production stopped entirely.
In a short time, the engineers recruited to work had restored things to normal, and the whole process was operating at 6:40 a.m. UTC. There was no need to reorganize the chains, which maintained the integrity of the network.
The event is Base’s second outage since its rollout. On September 5, 2023, there was a 43-minute prior incident of block production failure.
Centralized Design Raises Reliability Concerns
The sequencer design used by Base—a centralized component—has been cast in doubt as a result of the outage. Although there are a couple of sequencers, they only take a turn at a time and are chosen by the Conductor. The whole network may come to a halt if the sequencer provided is not available.
This architecture introduces a single point of failure, which is of concern to a system where large volumes are processed. This week, the Base has a total value of locked over 4.1 billion, as stated in DeFiLlama.
Base will, in turn, remap all sequencers in the system. Such a switch will enable backup nodes to come in instantly and not experience service disruptions.
Developers Accept Responsibility and Back Base
The Base engineering team was responsible for ensuring the outage. The head of engineering of this network, called Aflock, has not denied the mistake and said that the team is working on precautions to avoid such problems in the future.
Industry voices did not criticize; they supported. Save Finance founder 0xrooter noted that real users mean real complaints. Mert Mumtaz, the CEO of Helius Labs, likened the incident to previously observed problems in Solana, which nevertheless did not discourage its use.
It now has 1.09 million active addresses, with Solana leading at 2.83 million. The two chains are still highly utilized even after past network difficulties. The altcoin Solana has approximately $9.6 billion of DeFi TVL, whereas Base is sixth.
These statistics reveal that users’ confidence is high after outages, which indicates expansion in both ecosystems.
The post Base Outage Blamed on Faulty Backup Switch as Network Halts for 33 Minutes first appeared on Coinfea.
