Polygon network suffers from extended service outage after upgrade

Layer-2 Ethereum scaling solution Polygon has not produced a new block for over 11 hours, with developers attributing the issue to a technical upgrade on the network.

On March 10 at 4:20 pm UTC, Polygon (MATIC) network developers notified users on the project’s forum that there would likely be downtime starting at about 5:50 pm UTC due to maintenance required on one of the network’s three layers. A recent upgrade is thought to have caused an error in the network’s ability to achieve consensus.

“We suspect there may have been a bug in the upgrade which affected consensus and caused different Heimdall validators to be on different versions of the chain, thereby not reaching 2/3 consensus.”

As expected, the outage began at about 5:54 pm UTC.

The Polygon team issued an update at about 1:30 am UTC explaining that it was still working to fix the error and that a hotfix was deployed to help continue making blocks. That hotfix does not appear to have taken effect as of the time of writing.

The team also assured users that all funds and data on-chain are safe.

Polygon users apparently understood the outage was expected, but by the sixth hour, rumblings began to appear among the community. Most users have pointed out concerns at the extended amount of time for the outage. 

So uhhhhh.....Polygons been down for 6 hours and counting....

— King (@0xgodking) March 11, 2022

Others have noted that their profession or crypto business has been negatively affected by the outage. Twitter user @Miklos211 said:

“I'm literally unable to work thanks to that, could you please send us a time where we can expect the network to be back on?”

The Polygon network consists of three layers that each serves a unique role. Smart contracts run on the Ethereum (ETH) layer and the Bor layer helps produce blocks. The third Heimdall layer is where the problem lies.

Heimdall is a set of proof-of-stake (PoS) nodes that help the network reach consensus. With the Heimdall issue, Polygon cannot reach network consensus.

The last major bug that Polygon fixed put $24 billion worth of funds at risk, but was patched up without issue at the end of 2021.

Related: Polygon’s focus on building L2 infrastructure outweighs MATIC’s 50% drop from ATH

In related news, Polygon recently partnered with the multichain music nonfungible tokens (NFT) marketplace TokenTraxx to support the marketplace in the Polygon ecosystem. TokenTraxx will allow musicians to tokenize their work and sell it as NFTs.