Arbitrum network goes offline for at least 2 hours

Ethereum layer-2 network Arbitrum One has experienced a partial outage, according to an alert on the network’s official status website.

The sequencer “stalled” at 10:29 am ET (13:29 UTC) during a “significant surge in network traffic,” according to the alert. Arbitrum’s block explorer, Arbiscan, shows that some blocks are being produced. However, they appear to be only processing two transactions in each block.

Some users took to X (Twitter) to speculate about whether the outage was caused by inscriptions, as this would explain the small number of transactions in each block. However, this has not been confirmed by the team. Inscriptions are a type of data format used in some blockchain networks and are often used to carry collectible images. Inscriptions originated on Bitcoin but have recently been used on Arbitrum thanks to the MemeOrdi protocol.

On Arbitrum’s official Discord server, community admin Ricardo Gordon announced that the team is “working to resolve this as quickly as possible and will provide a post-mortem soon.”

According to blockchain analytics platform Layer2Beat, users of Abitrum can withdraw their assets to Ethereum even if the sequencer is down, although this will take 24 hours to process. If proposer validators are also down, the process will take at least six days, eight hours, 43 minutes, and 36 seconds.

This is a developing story, and further information will be added as it becomes available.