Ethereum scaling solution Starknet experienced another mainnet outage, raising concerns among investors about the network’s reliability.
The Layer-2 (L2) blockchain went offline on Tuesday, with the mainnet disrupted for two hours and 44 minutes. The outage slowed block production and caused transactions on the network to stall.
The disruption was traced to the network’s sequencer, which functions like a traffic controller for on-chain transactions, determining the order in which they are included in each block.
During the incident, the Starknet sequencer failed to recognize the “Cairo0 code,” according to data from status.starknet.io.
This was the second significant mainnet outage in just two months, raising questions about the reliability of Starknet, Ethereum’s seventh-largest Layer-2 network, which has $548 million in total value locked (TVL), according to L2beat.com.
During the previous outage on July 18, the Starknet mainnet was disrupted for only 13 minutes, experiencing slow block creation and a sluggish gateway.
Layer-2 (L2) networks are secondary blockchains built on top of Ethereum’s mainnet to increase transaction speed and capacity by processing transactions off-chain.
Starknet leverages ZK-rollups, specifically STARK proofs, to enable high-throughput, low-cost transactions and help scale the Ethereum mainnet.
Less than three hours into the outage, Starknet restored full functionality, according to a Tuesday post on the network’s community-run X account, which stated:
“Block production is back to normal. Most RPC providers are up-and-running, and the remaining ones will upgrade shortly.”
“To restore service, transactions submitted between 2:23 a.m. and 4:36 a.m. UTC were not processed,” the announcement stated, noting that a blockchain reorganization from block 1960612 was “committed, representing one hour of activity.”
This means that users will need to resubmit all transactions from that block onward. The team also said a “full timeline,” detailing the root cause of the outage and planned long-term prevention measures, will be published.
