Starknet experienced another major network interruption. On Monday, block production came to a complete halt for over two hours, leading to a total freeze of on-chain activity. The team acknowledged the incident in a brief message, stating that they are actively investigating to restore normal operation. At this stage, the exact cause of the outage has not been made public, but the network is up and running again.
This latest incident comes at a delicate time. This is already the second significant network interruption in about four months, raising questions about the operational maturity of Layer 2 since its last update.
An Unforgettable Precedent
The last major outage dates back to September 2, following the deployment of the Grinta update. This upgrade, one of Starknet’s most ambitious, introduced a decentralized sequencer architecture, a new fee market, and near-instant pre-confirmations.
The post-mortem released at the time outlined a complex chain of events. Failures in Ethereum nodes had caused a divergence between the three new sequencers. Manual intervention to address the issue had introduced new inconsistencies, exacerbated by a bug in the blockifier. The network ultimately required two chain reorganizations and several hours of downtime.
A StarkWare contributor had summarized the situation bluntly, acknowledging the seriousness of the incident while assuming the cost of innovation. The message was clear: no one had attempted to decentralize a ZK rollup of this scale in production before.
Starknet is not alone in these challenges. The entire Ethereum Layer 2 ecosystem has faced similar episodes. Base experienced a thirty-minute outage in August due to a sequencer issue. Linea halted block production for nearly an hour in September. Polygon zkEVM and Arbitrum also encountered temporary stops due to technical constraints or activity spikes.
These incidents highlight a structural reality: despite their scalability promise, most L2 networks still rely on centralized or semi-centralized components, especially in sequencing.
Ambitious Technical Trajectory Despite Setbacks
These outages contrast with Starknet’s intense development throughout 2025. The network achieved major milestones, such as stateful blob compression in the spring, attaining ‘Stage 1’ decentralization status, and integrating prover S-two in November aimed at improving computational efficiency by a factor of 100.
On the ecosystem front, Starknet has also expanded integrations, particularly with interoperability protocols and key players in the crypto infrastructure.
An Increasingly Demanding Market
Despite these advancements, repeated outages and lackluster activity are starting to impact how the network is perceived. The STRK token is trading around $0.08, down over 20% in a month and far from its February 2024 peak of over $3.
As Layer 2 networks become critical components of the Ethereum infrastructure, the market is becoming less tolerant of prolonged outages. For Starknet, the challenge now is clear: translate its technological advances into operational reliability that matches its ambitions.
