Polygon Suffers Latest Multi-Hour Outage After Node Halts

Polygon, a leading sidechain-based scaling solution for Ethereum, is suffering a multi-hour outage resulting from an issue with one of its nodes.

On March 10, Polygon announced that its network had been experiencing downtime since 5:50pm UTC as a result of its Heimdall node halting. The last transaction successfully processed by the network occurred over eight hours ago as of 2am UTC on March 11.

Source: polygonscan.com

The Polygon team said the Heimdall node is used by one of the two layers of its Proof-of-Stake (PoS) chain for transactions relating to validators and bridging. Polygon is tentatively attributing the node’s outage to an earlier minor upgrade to the network’s state bridging module.

“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,” Polygon said. They added that the Heimdall node will halt by design when consensus is not reached.

However, the team noted they are presently working to identify a “definitive cause” for the issue, in addition to “mitigation solutions that will resume operation as soon as possible.”

Despite the outage, Polygon assured that “all user funds and data are absolutely safe.”

Irate Users

Polygon’s Twitter is currently inundated with complaints from users who attempted to transact on the network while unaware of the outage.

Several users have reported unsuccessful transactions on the Polygon deployment of OpenSea where wallet balances have failed to update, making it appear as though funds have been lost. While the transactions are likely just stuck in the queue, scammers appear to be contacting affected users under the guise of working for Polygon’s support team.

“Watch out for scammers,” warned Twitter user ‘WeRyoshi’. The commenter also claimed to have been waiting 15 hours for their transaction to complete.

NFT project Courtyard has been forced to delay its public mint by 24 hours as a result of the outage.

Polygon has recently copped flak for suffering multiple outages since the start of the year. 

Last month, transactions were halted as a result of a gas-station outage. Prior to that, an issue with gas estimation resulted in users being unable to transact using NFTs on the network for several days in January.