Block production on Coinbase’s Base layer-2 blockchain was interrupted for 33 minutes due to a sequencer failover that did not recover as expected, developers reported in a post-mortem report. The outage, which began at 06:07 UTC, occurred when congestion on the network caused the active sequencer to fall behind in transaction processing.
Base’s Conductor module correctly attempted to hand off transaction ordering to a standby sequencer, but the backup had not been fully provisioned and was unable to produce blocks. As a result, block production stalled until engineers manually intervened at 06:40 UTC to restore service.
The extended outage highlighted a single-point-of-failure risk inherent in rollup networks that rely on centralized sequencers. Base developers noted that the backup sequencer’s incomplete provisioning extended the failover duration and increased operational complexity.
To prevent recurrence, Base plans to implement infrastructure checks ensuring new sequencer instances are fully Conductor-ready before they join the cluster. Additional test coverage and automation for provisioning workflows will be prioritized to enhance network resilience.
The incident follows previous downtime events on other OP Stack implementations and coincides with record on-chain activity driven by new token launches and social-app mints. Network reliability will be critical as user adoption and transaction volumes continue to grow on Base.
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