Starknet, the Ethereum layer-2 protocol, faced a block reorganization that resulted in a backlog of transactions. According to Starkscan, the protocol’s block monitoring tool, there was a four-hour outage in block production between blocks 630028 and 630029 on April 4. Surprisingly, Starknet’s status page did not indicate any outages on the network on the same day.
Starknet later issued a statement explaining that a bug related to rounding errors caused the block reorganization. Although block production continued as usual, the reorganization led to a transaction backlog that prevented the protocol from operating at full capacity.
The statement clarified, “Consequently, there were a few minutes during which new transactions could not be accepted for processing and were therefore rejected. Moreover, some transactions were reverted due to changing parameters (e.g., timestamps).”
Cointelegraph reached out to Starknet for further information and confirmation of the incident, but no additional details were provided, including whether block production was halted according to block data.
The last major outage reflected on Starknet’s status page occurred on March 13 during Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade.
Starknet’s recent outage adds to a series of challenges faced by major blockchain networks in the ecosystem. Solana, for instance, experienced a significant outage in early February 2024, during which block production on its mainnet was halted for over five hours.
This was not the first time Solana encountered such issues. Since January 2022, the network has witnessed multiple significant outages and numerous partial or major outage days.
Anza, a software development firm focused on Solana, released a postmortem report on the February outage. The report revealed a bug in Solana’s Just-in-Time (JIT) compilation cache, which compiles all programs before executing a transaction.
Austin Federa, head of strategy at the Solana Foundation, explained that there was an ongoing process to replace the old loader system with a new motor system, but it was scheduled to be disabled with an updated version.
He stated, “It looks like someone intentionally called that old instruction set, which hadn’t been used in quite a long time but was still around in the codebase. The JIT compiler ran into issues where it couldn’t find what it was looking for. And that’s what created the infinite loop.”
Solana faced further problems in early April, with approximately 75% of all transactions on the network failing due to the surge in activity brought about by the recent memecoin mania. Analysts believe that these failed transactions are primarily a result of bot activities on Solana, which aim to carry out arbitrage trades.
In a related matter, there have been discussions about the design flaws of Ethereum’s ERC-20, which scammers often exploit in the crypto space.