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The Polygon Network was down for hours after a bug in its Heimdall node halted the block producer.
Polygon Network Latest To Crash
The issue came to light when network developers notified users on March 10 at 4.20 PM UTC that maintenance was required on one of the network’s three layers, which could cause a downtime starting at around 5.50 PM UTC.
The team tweeted,
“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 Solana network, for example, had multiple infamous network outages just a few months back.
Bug In The Node Halts Validation
The Polygon team has not revealed the exact cause of the outage. The team has only stated that the module that acts as the PoS bridge between Ethereum and Polygon needed a “minor parameterization fix.” However, one outlook is that a bug was affecting the Heimdall node, which acts as a verifier layer creating checkpoints. Because of the bug, the Heimdall validators started using different chain versions and failed to reach 2/3 consensus. The Heimdall outage then, in turn, put a pause on the block producer layer, the Bor node, and caused the blackout on the user-facing Proof-of-Stake chain.
The team has clarified that since Heimdall only acts as a validator and does not handle transactions between users, the funds are safe and have not been affected by the outage.
Team Polygon Struggles To Fix Issue
The Polygon team attempted to fix the issue by deploying a hotfix to continue making blocks. Although initially, the hotfix was not taking effect, finally, around 1.49 AM UTC, the team announced on Twitter that the hotfix had worked and the network was up and running once again.
The tweet read,
“Polygon PoS has resumed operation as the team has deployed a temporary hotfix to address the issue. All user funds are safe. We're working on a long-term solution and will continue to update the official forum and other channels.”
Consequences Of The Outage
The network outage lasted for hours and was clearly an inconvenience for the Polygon community, who were unable to generate blocks. Many of the users took to Twitter to express their dissatisfaction over not being able to work on the network. However, despite the hours-long breakdown, the native token of the Polygon network, the MATIC, remained mostly unaffected. It is still the 16th largest crypto by market cap and is currently outperforming Bitcoin. Furthermore, Polygona has also announced that MATIC tokens worth over $3.9 billion have been staked in its validator ecosystem, with participants receiving a total of over $700 million worth of rewards.
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