Layer 2 Network Arbitrum Experiences Hourlong Network Outage

During a rocky Tuesday morning that saw a thwarted attack on layer 1 network Ethereum and an ongoing network outage for fellow smart contract platform Solana, layer 2 Ethereum scaling solution Arbitrum also experienced an outage of roughly an hour, leading to widespread commiseration between traders and DeFi farmers across various ecosystems.

Starting at 10:30 a.m. ET, users on Twitter and in Arbitrum’s official Discord Support channel began reporting problems with the network. Users could not process transactions, and chain explorers showed that blocks had ceased to validate.

The team acknowledged the outage in a tweet.

Traders, investors and farmers poked fun at the seemingly unrelated outages on two increasingly popular networks:

At 11:28 a.m.ET Offchain Labs director AJ Warner announced on Discord that “Arbitrum One is back online and operational,” and that the team would publish more information on the outage later today. The Arbitrum team did not respond to a request for comment by press time.

Read More: Inside Arbitrum’s Staggered Mainnet Launch

The layer 2 was experiencing a run of success leading up to Tuesday’s outage, with its closely watched total value locked (TVL) metric spiking as high as $2 billion as “meme farms” – DeFi products that implement existing verticals with unsustainably high liquidity mining rewards – attracted traders and gamblers to the chain.

Key DeFi protocol Curve also announced the launch of an implementation on the network late Monday night:

In an interview with CoinDesk in August, Warner and Offchain Labs co-founder Steven Goldfeder said that the rollout of the network would be more of a process than a moment, contrary to the desires of Ethereum users eager for scaling solutions.

“We’re very excited, very humbled by the support we’ve gotten,” said Goldfeder of the network’s launch. “Today’s the day we can finally provide scaling for the Ethereum user. But as exciting as that is, we’re rolling up our sleeves because there’s still work to be done. It’s still a mainnet beta, and there’s still steps to take to full decentralization.”