Polygon network experiencing hours long outage due to node bug

Polygon, a layer 2 solution for the Ethereum blockchain, has experienced an extended outage due to an issue with its Heimdall node.

The Polygon team posted an update warning of the outage, saying that a recent upgrade halted the node, and that all user funds and data are “absolutely safe”. Using a blockchain explorer shows the last transaction recorded on the Polygon blockchain was a lengthy period previously, at time of writing.

The team suspect the Heimdall node, which is used for validator related transactions, is suffering from a bug which has affected consensus, causing different validators to be on separate versions of the blockchain.

“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 team writes. “When using Tendermint consensus, this situation will cause the Heimdall chain to halt.”

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The team expressed they are working on identifying the cause of the outage and “preparing mitigation solutions that will resume operation as soon as possible”, and iterated, “while there is a liveness issue, there are no security or safety issues. Meaning that while there will be downtime, state and funds are not affected.”

Polygon is one of the most popular and most used layer 2 solutions for Ethereum, aiming to make usage of the network both faster and cheaper.

News of the outage seemingly hasn’t affected the price of the native token, MATIC, which has traded sideways around US$1.43 in the last 24 hours.

Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this piece owned MATIC and other cryptocurrencies.