Arbitrum One, an Ethereum layer 2 network, faced an outage lasting approximately 78 minutes on December 15, but has since recovered and is operational again, as confirmed by a statement from the network's Discord community manager, Ricardo "Gordan." Despite the restoration, gas charges on the network are notably elevated, although they are expected to "normalize."
As reported in an alert on Arbitrum's official status page, the sequencer encountered an issue, freezing at 10:29 AM ET (13:29 UTC) due to a substantial surge in network traffic. At 5:58 PM UTC, Arbiscan, Arbitrum’s block explorer, displayed block generation activity, but it seemed that these blocks were processing merely two transactions each.
Speculation on X (Twitter) emerged regarding the cause of the outage, with some suggesting inscription as a potential reason for the low transaction count per block. This speculation was later confirmed by the team. Inscriptions, a data format present in certain blockchain networks, are often used to carry collectible images. Recently, inscriptions have been utilized on Arbitrum through the MemeOrdi protocol.
According to Layer2Beat, a blockchain analytics platform, users on Arbitrum can withdraw assets to Ethereum despite the sequencer being offline. However, this process takes 24 hours to complete. If the proposer validator also faces an outage, the withdrawal duration extends to at least six days, eight hours, 43 minutes, and 36 seconds. Notably, the network was only down for less than two hours.
