Polygon, a layer-2 blockchain, went down yesterday. Developers blamed a technical upgrade on the blockchain network for the network’s inability to produce new blocks for over 11 hours. The incident left users puzzled, especially because of its lengthiness. However, the network is now functioning again after developers deployed a “temporary fix”. Polygon’s native token $MATIC.X lost 2% in today’s market, which wasn’t as bad as other coins.A message was posted on the Polygon network’s forum notifying users that maintenance would require downtime on one of the system’s three layers. The layer in question was the so-called Heimdall node, which acts as a verifier layer that creates checkpoints.
“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,” it said.
It is believed that a recent upgrade prevented the network from achieving consensus. Heimdall may have been halted by the bug since validators were using different chain versions. The team also said that Heimdall’s downtime also caused Polygon’s Bor node to cease working since Bor acts as a block producer and is a “user-facing Proof-of-Stake chain.”
Business as usual resumed after 11 hours of downtime. However, as if an 11-hour outage wasn’t confidence-inducing, the developers indicated their fix was only “a temporary solution.” (What does that mean?!??!)
Anyway, the team is reportedly working on a solution that will fix the problem in the long term. In a Twitter post, developers reassured users that their funds and data are safe, as the nodes only affect validator transactions, not data or transactions between users.
Even though the issue has been resolved, it has raised many questions because Polygon has been experiencing network outages frequently. Previously, the network experienced congestion due to high demand in January. There have been network problems with the blockchain platforms, such as Solana, which causes speculation that the field may not have matured enough to deliver the promised benefits.