Polygon network suffered a major 11-hour outage during an update yesterday. Why did this happen? Should you be worried? Covered: The Cause Of Polygon’s Network Outage Polygon’s Temporary Fix Should Polygon Users And Holders Be Worried? The Cause Of Polygon’s Network Outage Yesterday, Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution, the Polygon network, was down for about eleven […] The post Why You Shouldn’t Worry About Polygon’s Network Outage appeared first on CryptosRus.

Why You Shouldn’t Worry About Polygon’s Network Outage

Polygon network suffered a major 11-hour outage during an update yesterday. Why did this happen? Should you be worried?

Covered:

  • The Cause Of Polygon’s Network Outage
  • Polygon’s Temporary Fix
  • Should Polygon Users And Holders Be Worried?

The Cause Of Polygon’s Network Outage

Yesterday, Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution, the Polygon network, was down for about eleven hours. Polygon developers notified users of potential downtime due to an upcoming planned network update.

The Tendermint implementation referred to in the tweet is a consensus engine that essentially organizes and secures signature schemes and various data structures. However, the upgrade was actually on the Heimdall node – which uses the Tendermint consensus implementation but doesn’t specifically doesn’t handle user transactions on the Polygon network. The Heimdall implementation was designed for validator-related transactions and bridging and was the root cause of the outage.

As expected, the outage began around 5:50 pm UTC, but then the Polygon team issued an update that things may not have been going to plan. At around 1:30 am UTC, the team revealed that an extended outage was caused because there “may have been a bug” in the upgrade:

“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.”

The fact that the validators could not reach consensus caused a halt to the creation of blocks, resulting in the network’s outage. Although the outage was not expected to have a bug or last for as long as it did (about 11 hours), the Polygon Network assured users that no transactions or funds were lost and they issued a temporary fix. The Polygon Network is now running smoothly and blocks are being created every minute at press time.

Polygon’s Temporary Fix

At approximately 4 am UTC, the Polygon developers successfully released a hotfix which restored operations on the network:

“We appreciate your support during this time and have an update: we have deployed a temporary hotfix to unblock the Bor chain and resume producing blocks on the Polygon chain. While this solution is temporary, the team is working on implementing a longer-term upgrade to fix the Heimdall issue.”

However, the developers commented on the network’s bridge and said it “will not be active until we fully resolve this issue”. Although the hotfix restored typical transactions and block production on the network, users won’t be able to use the bridge until the final solution is released.

Should Polygon Users And Holders Be Worried?

Overall, the issue arose due to a planned upgrade that had a bug in the coding, the Polygon developers recognized this quickly and added a temporary fix, and the network is up and running per usual (for the most part). Users were unhappy with the downtime, and although the issue is not yet fully resolved, growing pains like this happen. Crypto projects are all still a work in progress.

Thankfully, the Polygon developers demonstrated their competency during this upgrade. The issue caused no loss of funds, and they were working carefully and diligently to secure the network and got it up and running as quickly as possible. If anything, this is just a positive reaction to an unplanned event handled well by the Polygon developers. Additionally, it shows how active the network users and developers are, and how successfully they can deal with potential problems. I mean, it’s better to have developers working and solving issues than to have no developers at all.

 

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