On Friday, the Ethereum Layer 2 Solution Arbitrum had a few moments of downtime. This was due to an increase in network traffic and gas fees caused by a surge of inscriptions. Since then, operations have returned to normal and gas prices have recovered steadily.
The Arbitrum One Sequencer was down for a little over an hour on December 15. According to an update posted on the official Arbitrum Foundation Account on X, the issue was caused after a surge of inscriptions caused a stalling in the Sequencer.
The network traffic surged at 10:29 am ET and the Technical glitch caused a surge in traffic on the network and, consequently, a rise in transaction fees.
The Arbitrum team has not yet provided a full post-mortem on the temporary outage. However, preliminary investigations have shown that the disruption was due to the inscriptions rising in height, causing the Sequencer’s failure.
Crypto Analyst cygaar commented on X, suggesting that people had spammed the layer two chain with inscriptions, which overwhelmed the network’s Sequencer and created a huge backlog of transactions, resulting in skyrocketing gas fees.
The Arbitrum Team stated that gas prices on Arbitrum One have stabilized and operations are back to normal. They are continuing to gather more information and will provide a full post-mortem in the coming days.
