Ethereum Layer-2 solution Starknet suffered another mainnet disruption on Tuesday, reigniting concerns over the network’s reliability among users and investors.
The outage, which lasted for two hours and 44 minutes, brought block production to a near standstill and forced users to resubmit transactions. According to the project’s official status page, the incident stemmed from a failure in Starknet’s sequencer—the component responsible for ordering and packaging transactions into blocks, much like a traffic controller on the blockchain.
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During the downtime, the sequencer failed to properly recognize the “Cairo0 code,” a programming element integral to Starknet’s architecture. The breakdown halted block creation and stagnated on-chain activity until services were eventually restored.
This marks Starknet’s second mainnet outage in just two months, a setback that has raised fresh doubts about the scalability solution’s ability to deliver consistent performance as it continues to attract developers and projects.
Source: status.starknet.io
This was the second major mainnet outage in less than two months, raising fresh questions about Starknet’s reliability. The network is currently the seventh-largest Ethereum Layer-2, with roughly $548 million in total value locked (TVL), according to data from L2Beat.
Starknet’s earlier outage on July 18 was far less severe, lasting just 13 minutes and causing only minor delays in block production and gateway performance.
Top Ethereum L2s by TVL. Source: L2beat.com
Layer-2 (L2) networks are secondary blockchains that sit on top of Ethereum’s mainnet, designed to boost speed and capacity by handling transactions off-chain before settling them back on Ethereum.
Starknet leverages ZK-rollups, and more specifically STARK proofs, to deliver high-throughput, low-cost transactions, enabling the Ethereum network to scale while maintaining security and decentralization.
Starknet back online, declares network ‘fully operational.
After hours of downtime, Starknet reports it is back online and running normally.
“Block production is back to normal. Most RPC providers are up-and-running, and the remaining ones will upgrade shortly.”
“To restore service, transactions submitted between 2:23 am and 4:36 am UTC were not processed,” the announcement said, adding that a blockchain reorganization from block 1960612 was “committed, representing one hour of activity.”
As a result, all transactions from that block onward must be resubmitted by users, the team confirmed. Starknet added that it will release a full incident report outlining the root cause of the outage along with long-term measures to prevent similar disruptions in the future.