The production of blocks on the basic Coinbase network (corner) stopped for 33 minutes early Tuesday following a sequencer switch which did not recover as expected, the developers said in a post Mortem report on Wednesday.
The breakdown started at 06:07 UTC on August 5, when the active sequencer was late due to the congestion of chain activity. While the basic driver module – a central component of the OP battery designed to maintain availability – has correctly tried to move leadership to a rescue sequencer, the new instance had not been fully provisionable and could not produce blocks.
A sequencer organizes transactions to be placed in blocks. The system has properly tried to put the responsibility of a backup sequencer, but this backup was not yet fully ready and could not produce blocks.
Since it could not change automatically, production is dead until the engineers manually summarize the problem. The network was completely recovered at 06:40, depending on the report.
To avoid the risks of reorganization, that is to say when a blockchain temporarily rewrites the story by replacing the blocks confirmed by alternative blocks-the team made a conductor break and coordinated a controlled leadership transition. This process has contributed to the duration of the breakdown.
As such, the failure has highlighted an operational key risk in layer 2 rollers that rely on centralized sequencers to order and submit transactions. These systems remain dependent on the rapid tilting mechanisms and full supply, and a single point difference in this chain can cause complete network stands.
Base said that it will implement infrastructure changes to ensure that all the sequencers added to the cluster are ready for the driver, even before the election, and will prioritize an improvement in testing of tests to validate this logic.
The incident follows the previous stops on other OP battery channels and just like the base has seen record traffic from new launches of tokens and NFT mints linked to social chain applications like Farcaster and Zora.
Read more: the basic network has been suffering from the 1st stoppage since 2023, stopping operations for 29 minutes
