Base, the Ethereum layer-2 network incubated by Coinbase, suffered a block production halt on Thursday due to a consensus problem that generated an invalid block. The outage began around noon Eastern Time and lasted over two hours, during which no new blocks were sequenced. The network assured users that funds remained secure.
The issue was traced to a consensus fault that prevented new block creation. After isolating the problem, block sequencing resumed normally. Applications and infrastructure began recovering once nodes were restarted and synced.
Despite the disruption, Base is proceeding with its Beryl hardfork upgrade. The upgrade will establish a new token standard for stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets (RWAs), while also reducing withdrawal delays. This comes after a separate incident in May that caused approximately 30 hours of withdrawal delays.
Outages on blockchain networks are rare but do occur. Other major networks like Solana and Sui have experienced similar downtime in the past.