Starknet Suffers 4-Hour Outage, Second Major Downtime in Months

The disruption began just before 5:00 am ET on Monday, as indicated by the network’s status page reporting slow block production. In response, Starknet developers made the decisive move to temporarily pause all mainnet block sequencing. A message shared in the network’s Telegram community stated the action was taken “out of caution” to investigate a proving error observed on a transaction and to verify chain safety and state consistency. This halt meant transactions were not processed during the investigation period.

By approximately 7:00 am ET, the team had identified a bug and commenced additional testing, validation, and impact assessment. The resolution involved a significant technical intervention: reverting the entire blockchain to an earlier state, specifically block 5187263. Operations were restored around 9:00 am ET, concluding an outage lasting more than four hours. The network acknowledged on social media platform X that transactions submitted during a brief 18-minute window after the restart may not have been processed properly.

Monday’s incident is not an isolated event for Starknet, representing the second hours-long operational outage in a matter of months. This pattern raises critical questions about the network’s stability. The previous major disruption occurred in September following the implementation of the “Grinta” upgrade. That event resulted in over five hours of downtime and necessitated two separate chain reorganizations, which effectively rewound approximately 80 minutes of finalized transactions.

The recurrence of such significant failures challenges the core value proposition of layer-2 networks like Starknet, which are designed to provide scalable, efficient, and reliable transaction processing for the Ethereum ecosystem. Each outage undermines user and developer confidence, as highlighted by coverage from outlets like Decrypt. The Starknet team has committed to publishing a retrospective report detailing the full timeline, root causes, and long-term prevention measures, which will be closely scrutinized by the crypto community.

Despite the severe operational disruption, the market reaction to the outage was notably muted. The price of Starknet’s native token, STRK, demonstrated significant resilience, dipping less than 1% over the 24-hour period following the incident to a price of approximately $0.090. Furthermore, STRK maintained a substantial weekly gain of about 11%, indicating that broader market factors or investor sentiment outweighed immediate concerns about the downtime.

This stability occurs as Starknet expands its scope beyond its primary role as an Ethereum scaling solution. In September, the network integrated Bitcoin staking, allowing users to stake BTC natively and earn STRK tokens as rewards. This move ties the network’s fortunes more closely to the broader crypto market, including top assets like Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH). Interestingly, Ethereum itself traded positively during the event, rising about 2% on the day to $3,192 and nearly 9% over the previous week, showing a decoupling from Starknet’s specific issues.