On Thursday, Coinbase’s layer 2 network Base experienced a nearly two-hour outage that brought all transactions on the chain to a halt. The disruption, reportedly triggered by an invalid block that derailed the network’s consensus mechanism, marked the most significant incident on Base in the past 90 days, according to its official status page.
How did the outage begin?
The issue first emerged at 16:03 UTC, when Base’s status page flagged block production on the mainnet as “unhealthy.” Shortly after, the Base team publicly acknowledged a problem with block production and assured users that their assets remained safe despite the outage.
The Base team stated that mainnet block production was temporarily halted due to the issue, but emphasized that all assets on the network were secure.
Later updates revealed a consensus error had occurred because an invalid block entered the sequence pipeline, effectively halting the creation of new blocks. Roughly 50 minutes after the incident began, at 16:52 UTC, the team reported they had identified the root cause of the network disruption.
Mini glossary: Consensus is the mechanism by which nodes in a blockchain network agree on which transactions are valid. The sequencer is the component responsible for gathering transactions and turning them into blocks; in systems that rely on a single sequencer, a failure in this layer can lead to widespread network downtime.
Network resumes after two hours
Almost exactly two hours after the initial disruption, Base resumed operations. The team confirmed that recovery was largely verified across the ecosystem, although a number of stuck nodes would require restarting and re-syncing to return to normal functionality.
The Base team also confirmed that block production had returned to normal, that widespread recovery was verified, and that troubled nodes should resolve once they completed restarts and synchronization.
Additionally, the team stated they had pinpointed the underlying cause of the outage and would prioritize publishing a detailed post-mortem covering the lessons learned and corrective actions taken. As a major layer 2 solution developed by Coinbase and operating atop Ethereum, Base has gained significant prominence in the scaling ecosystem.
The timing: hours before a key upgrade
Notably, the outage occurred just hours before the network’s planned Beryl upgrade, an update designed to deliver a new token standard for stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets, among other changes.
According to the network’s status page, this was the first block production halt on Base mainnet in the last 90 days, though the chain has encountered previous challenges. In May, users faced around 30 hours of withdrawal delays, and another outage was documented in August 2025.
Market impact in focus
To support ecosystem recovery, the Base team advised node operators to restart their systems to simplify synchronization. Meanwhile, Coinbase shares saw a sharp decline of more than 5 percent during the most recent trading session, with COIN’s price hovering around $142.52.
