Coinbase’s Base blockchain is underwent an outage on Thursday, causing halts and delays in transactions, deposits, and withdrawals. In a fresh update, the Base team said that the blockchain has resumed the sequencing of new blocks with all internal nodes syncing properly. The outage occured just hours before the blockchain underwent its Beryl update.
The instability began around 16:03 UTC (20:03 GST) when engineers at Base posted their first update notifying the community that the block production on the mainnet had become “unhealthy.” By 17:21 UTC (21:21 GST), the team announced that they had isolated a consensus issue and that a fix was in the works.
Upon investigation, the engineers at Base attributed the issue to an invalid block that was sequenced on-chain and prevented new blocks rom being added after block no. 47806542.
At around 20:27 GST, the Base team had said that the mainner of the Ethereum L2 was halted.
In the most latest update the team said, “We have recovered healthy blockbuilding and confirmed that ecosystem-wide infrastructure is able to recover syncing. We continue monitoring to ensure stability.”
The network operators have reassured that funds on the blockchain remain completely secure.
While the exact reason why an invalid block was sequenced on the Base chain remains unclear, its timing does align with Base’s upcoming Beryl upgrade. Scheduled to be completed on Thursday, the update is intended to improve Base’s support for tokenization and speed of cross-chain asset transfers.
Despite the blockchain issue, the Beryl hardfork is slated to be activated by 18:00 UTC (22:00 GST) on Thursday, as per Base.
