Offchain Labs Says Arbitrum experienced no outages for an hour, despite transaction issues
Offchain Labs, the team behind the Arbitrum Layer 2 project, said the network experienced no outages for an hour yesterday. "Did Arbitrum One experience an hour-long outage? No," CTO Harry Kalodner said Friday on social media. "Did the batch giver stop posting for an hour? Yes."
Many users thought that Arbitrum experienced an hour-long outage as the Ethereum Layer 2 network did not appear to be processing transactions. However, Kalodner explained that the disruption was caused by the batch giver. "What happens if the batcher stops posting? The sequencer will continue to receive and sequence transactions along with publishing confirmations, but the batch will not post," explains Kalodner. "For most users, blocks will operate as usual, although anyone waiting for full finality will experience a pause."
"The batch sender experienced a limited case in the geth mempool implementation that caused it to reject a transaction if the total cost of all transactions in the mempool was greater than the sender's balance," he continued. "This prevents batch givers from increasing any transaction fees. This becomes especially complex because the primary ETH balance of Arbitrum One batch givers is held in a separate smart contract called gas return that reimburses them for ETH spent on posting batches to increase the security of their funds."
The batch giver should have enough ETH to send all transactions, but geth is rejecting his attempts," Kalodner added. "Is geth experiencing a bug? Kind of yes, but actually no. Batch givers consume about 2% of Ethereum's gas limit and gas returns are not uncommon. It's not surprising to experience strange limited cases."
What Happened On August 17, 2023 around 0600 hours ago, Arbitrum experienced an hour-long lag between batches 316,002 and 316,003, according to blockchain tracker Arbiscan.
Some social media users claimed that this meant they couldn't send transactions during this hour-long dark period, leading them to believe that the entire blockchain was either frozen or crashed.