A sequencer bug was the reason for two outages on Coinbase’s Layer 2 community Base final week, in keeping with a postmortem.
base engineering crew said A autopsy on Saturday recognized a bug within the sequencer’s block building logic that allowed “stale journal state” to persist after a failed transaction validation.
“An invalid transaction was obtained by the block builder and failed throughout execution as anticipated, however the journal state containing accessed accounts and storage slots was inadvertently not cleared,” the crew mentioned.
base layer 2 community Run a single sequencer. Meaning one bug can deliver every thing down. It’s a centralized blockchain part that orders transactions and has been the reason for outages for different layer 2 chains akin to Arbitrum, OP Mainnet, and zkSync Period.
Two outages occurred on the Base mainnet on Thursday and Friday, with the primary incident lasting 116 minutes and the second incident lasting 20 minutes.
Sequencer and validator nodes have been unable to advance past the invalid block till the brand new layer 2 block was utterly stopped and the sequence was restored.
The crew fastened the failure by patching the sequencer in order that the journal state is up to date correctly throughout execution.
Nevertheless, they mentioned mitigation took longer than anticipated “attributable to infrastructure situations unrelated to the unique bug.”
Additionally, after a system reset, a “race situation” occurred and the sequencer could not sustain, inflicting a second outage.
Associated: Coinbase’s Base resumes block manufacturing after 2-hour outage
Sooner or later, the Base engineering crew plans to enhance the “fuzz take a look at” of the protocol. This contains bombarding the system with massive quantities of random, malformed, or sudden enter to search out bugs, and constructing in “swish restoration” in order that validator nodes don’t should be manually restarted within the occasion of future incidents.
This isn’t the primary time Base has been out of service.
This isn’t the primary sequencer-related outage for Base, which stopped producing blocks for 17 minutes in September 2024 and for about half-hour in August 2025.
Base is the second largest Layer 2 community by complete quantity secured, at just below $11 billion. According to To L2 beat.
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