Arbitrum network goes offline for at least 2 hours

Ethereum layer-2 network Arbitrum One has experienced a partial outage, according to an alert on the network’s official status website. 

The sequencer “stalled” at 10:29 am ET (13:29 UTC) during a “significant surge in network traffic,” according to the alert. Arbitrum’s block explorer, Arbiscan, shows that some blocks are being produced. However, they appear to be only processing two transactions in each block.

Some users took to X (formerly Twitter) to speculate about whether the outage was caused by inscriptions, as this would explain the small number of transactions in each block. However, this has not been confirmed by the team. Inscriptions are a type of data format used in some blockchain networks and are often used to carry collectible images. Inscriptions originated on Bitcoin but have recently been used on Arbitrum thanks to the MemeOrdi protocol.

This is a developing story, and further information will be added as it becomes available.