• Ethereum layer 2 solution Arbitrum had a brief downtime on Friday.
• An update showed a surge in inscriptions had contributed to the spike in network traffic and gas fees.
• Arbitrum has since “resolved this issue,” with operations back to normal and gas prices steadily recovering.

Arbitrum, a rollup chain on Ethereum, is running normally after a brief downtime on Friday.

The layer 2 Ethereum scaling solution faced a little more than one hour network outage on December 15. An update posted on the official Arbitrum Foundation account on X noted that the outage happened after a surge in inscriptions triggered a stall in the Arbitrum One Sequencer.

Arbitrum operations back to normal

According to details shared with the community, the Arbitrum One Sequencer and Feed stalled approximately at 10:29 AM ET. The technical hitch led to a significant surge in network traffic and inevitably a spike in transaction fees.

The Arbitrum One Sequencer stalled at 10:29 AM ET during a significant surge in network traffic.

We are working to resolve as quickly as possible and will provide a post-mortem as soon as possible.

More details here: https://t.co/NBlzFuPFro

— Arbitrum (💙,🧡) (@arbitrum) December 15, 2023

While the platform has yet to provide a full post-mortem of the temporary outage, initial investigations show that rising inscriptions triggered the Sequencer’s failure. Here’s the team’s initial report.

“The Arbitrum One Sequencer is up and running after a temporary outage starting at 10:29 AM EST and resuming at 11:57 AM EST. The team is actively investigating, but we can confirm that a sustained surge of inscriptions triggered the sequencer to stop relaying transactions properly.”

Crypto analyst cygaar noted in a comment on X that its possible people had spammed the layer 2 chain with inscriptions. These overwhelmed the network’s sequencer, creating a huge backlog of transactions and skyrocketing the gas fees.

Summary of the Arbitrum outage and high Ethereum gas prices:

– People are spamming inscription transactions on Arbitrum. These are transactions that submit some hex data on-chain (images and metadata mostly).

– My guess is this overwhelmed the sequencer itself, preventing L2… pic.twitter.com/deJn4yVsT1

— cygaar (@0xCygaar) December 15, 2023

 In a later update, the Arbitrum team said:

“Gas prices on Arbitrum One have stabilized and operations are back to normal. We’re continuing to gather more information and will provide a full post-mortem in the coming days.”