Arbitrum network went offline for 78 minutes because of inscriptions
The Arbitrum One network stalled at 10:29 am ET (13:29 UTC), according to an alert issued by the network’s status page.
Ethereum layer-2 network Arbitrum One has experienced an outage on December 15 for approximately 78 minutes, but is now back online, according to a statement made by the network’s Discord community manager, Ricardo “Gordan.” Gas fees on the network are still abnormally high, but should “normalize”
The sequencer “stalled” at 10:29 am ET (13:29 UTC) during a “significant surge in network traffic,” according to an alert that was posted to Arbitrum’s official status page. At 5:58 pm UTC, Arbitrum’s block explorer, Arbiscan, showed that some blocks were being produced. However, they appeared to be only processing two transactions in each block.
Some users took to X (Twitter) to speculate about whether the outage was caused by inscriptions, as this would explain the small number of transactions in each block. This was later confirmed by the team. Inscriptions are a type of data format used in some blockchain networks and are often used to carry collectible images. Inscriptions originated on Bitcoin but have recently been used on Arbitrum thanks to the MemeOrdi protocol.
