Arbitrum (ARB) came to a halt in the early hours of the day due to a network outage. Following the incident, Arbitrum announced that after a brief network interruption, all systems were back up and running.
Arbitrum Falls Victim to Inscriptions
Arbitrum, a Layer 2 network operating on the Ethereum (ETH) Blockchain, stated in an announcement made in the early hours that the continuous increase in the number of inscriptions inspired by Bitcoin Ordinals triggered a sequencer to stop, resulting in a temporary outage of approximately one and a half hours, and that all systems are currently operational.
A data researcher at VC firm Dragonfly, who works under the pseudonym Hildobby, commented on the Arbitrum network outage on his personal X (formerly known as Twitter) account. He noted that 90% of the transactions on the network before the stoppage were related to inscriptions, stating, “The number of inscriptions on Arbitrum was increasing during the hours leading to the network’s stoppage,” and mentioned that the inscription called ‘fair’ was the trigger for the outage.
Transaction Fees on the Network Stabilized
In an update from Arbitrum, it was emphasized that the transaction fees (gas fee) on the network have been balanced and that all operations have now returned to normal. The Arbitrum team continued to collect more information about the network outage and communicated that a full analysis would be provided in the coming days.
Harry Kalodner, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Offchain Labs, the development company behind the network, made a statement on his personal X account, saying, “Today was a tough day. There are many lessons to be learned and a lot of work to be done to ensure Arbitrum delivers the excellence people rightfully expect. Engineering in Web3 is hard, but we are all in it to build a better future.”
Inscriptions similar to Bitcoin Ordinals recently caused issues on the Telegram Open Network (TON) as well. On December 7th, the network faced a significant drop to one transaction per second following users flooding the network with inscriptions. Last month, the same type of transactions led to an increase in Polygon’s (MATIC) transaction volume and a rise in the network’s transaction fees.
