Polygon Network Suffers Extended Outage After Upgrade

The layer 2 scaling solution has been down for over 11 hours as users are wondering what the hold-up is on fixing a bug that compromised network consensus.

Polygon Network Suffers Extended Outage After Upgrade

Layer 2 Ethereum scaling solution Polygon has not produced a new block for over 11 hours, with developers attributing the issue to a technical upgrade on the network.

On March 10 at 4:20 pm UTC, Polygon (MATIC) network developers informed the users on the project's forum that there would likely be downtime starting around 5:50 pm UTC due to maintenance required on one of the network's three layers. A recent upgrade is thought to have generated an issue in the network's capability to reach consensus.

“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.”

The polygon team issued an update at about 1:30 am UTC declaring that it was still working to fix the error and that a hotfix was deployed to help continue creating blocks that hotfix doesn't appear to have taken effect at that time.

Polygon users apparently understood the outage was expected, but by the sixth hour, rumblings started to appear. Most users have pointed out concerns at the extended amount of time for the outage. 

Twitter user @Miklos211 said: Profession or crypto business has been negatively affected by the outage. 
“I'm literally unable to work thanks to that, could you please send us a time where we can expect the network to be back on?”

The Polygon network consists of three layers that serve a unique role. Smart contracts run on the Ethereum (ETH) layer and the Bor layer helps produce blocks, the third Heimdall layer is where the problem lies. 

Heimdall is a set of proof-of-stake (Pos) nodes that help the network reach agreement with the Heimdall issue, Polygon cannot reach network consensus. 

The major Polygon bug has been fixed put $24 billion worth of funds at risk but was patched up without issue at the end of 2021. 

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