Ethereum’s Starknet Goes Down Again: Nearly 3-Hour Outage Hits Scaling Network

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Ethereum’s scaling game took another hit. 

Starknet, one of the leading Layer-2 networks built to speed up and cheapen Ethereum transactions, went offline for nearly three hours on Tuesday – its second major outage in just two months. 

The disruption followed the much-anticipated Grinta upgrade, raising questions about whether high-performance blockchain networks can deliver on reliability as they race to decentralize.

Network Goes Down After Major Upgrade

Starknet, Ethereum’s seventh-largest Layer-2 blockchain with $548 million locked in its ecosystem, suffered a two-hour, 44-minute outage early Tuesday.

The disruption followed the rollout of Grinta (v0.14.0), a major network upgrade meant to overhaul Starknet’s architecture. The network’s sequencer, which manages the order of transactions, failed to process activity, halting block production and leaving users unable to complete transactions.

A blockchain reorganization was triggered from block 1,960,612, meaning an hour’s worth of activity had to be rolled back. Users were asked to resubmit all transactions made during that window.

Second Outage in Two Months

This is the second time in two months that Starknet has faced downtime. Back in July, the network stalled for about 13 minutes due to slow block creation.

The repeat incidents raise questions about whether Ethereum’s Layer-2 networks, often promoted as a solution for scaling, can deliver both speed and stability.

Team Response

The Starknet team recently confirmed that the network was “fully operational” again.

High Ambitions, Growing Pains

The Grinta upgrade was designed to make Starknet more decentralized, with changes to its sequencer, fee system, and mempool. Starknet has also announced plans to integrate Bitcoin staking following overwhelming community approval of proposal SNIP-31.

But as today’s incident shows, major network upgrades come with risk.