Block manufacturing on Coinbase’s (COIN) Base community halted for 33 minutes early Tuesday following a sequencer failover that didn’t recuperate as anticipated, builders mentioned in a post-mortem report Wednesday.
The outage started at 06:07 UTC on Aug. 5, when the lively sequencer fell behind attributable to congestion from on-chain exercise. Whereas Base’s Conductor module — a core element of the OP Stack designed to keep up uptime — appropriately tried to shift management to a standby sequencer, the brand new occasion had not been totally provisioned and was unable to provide blocks.
A sequencer organizes transactions for putting into blocks. The system appropriately tried at hand off duty to a backup sequencer, however that backup wasn’t totally prepared but and couldn’t produce blocks.
Because it couldn’t routinely change once more, manufacturing stalled till engineers manually fastened the difficulty. The community was totally recovered by 06:40, in line with the report.
To keep away from reorganization dangers — that’s, when a blockchain quickly rewrites historical past by changing confirmed blocks with various ones — the workforce paused Conductor and coordinated a managed management transition. This course of contributed to the size of the outage.
As such, the outage highlighted a key operational danger in layer-2 rollup networks that depend on centralized sequencers to order and submit transactions. These programs stay depending on speedy failover mechanisms and full provisioning, and a single-point hole on this chain can result in full community stalls.
Base mentioned it can implement infrastructure adjustments to make sure all sequencers added to the cluster are Conductor-ready, even earlier than election, and can prioritize improved check protection to validate this logic.
The incident follows earlier halts on different OP Stack chains and comes simply as Base has seen report visitors from new token launches and NFT mints tied to on-chain social apps like Farcaster and Zora.
Learn extra: Base Network Suffers 1st Downtime Since 2023, Halts Operations for 29 Minutes