Ethereum News Today: Base 33-Minute Ethereum Layer-2 Outage Traced to Faulty Sequencer

Base’s Ethereum layer-2 blockchain experienced a 33-minute network outage on July 19, 2025, due to a faulty sequencer, according to a post-mortem published by Base Build. The incident began at 6:07 am UTC when the active sequencer began falling behind in block production, triggering Conductor — Base’s system for managing sequencer availability — to switch to a backup sequencer. However, the backup sequencer had not been properly configured and was unable to take over block production. As a result, the network was unable to process transactions for the duration of the outage, which was resolved by 6:40 am UTC [1].

Jesse Pollak, co-founder of Base, stated in the post-mortem that the team acted quickly to address the issue and that additional time was spent ensuring that no chain reorganization was required. According to Base Build’s X account, the sequencer in question was still being set up and was in an “unhealthy mainnet” state when the switch was attempted. This highlights the centralized nature of Base’s infrastructure, where Conductor plays a critical role in managing sequencer availability, creating a single point of failure that can disrupt the entire network.

The incident adds to a history of outages for Base, including a 43-minute block production halt shortly after its public launch on September 5, 2023. The team behind Base, which currently secures more than $4.1 billion in total value locked (TVL), has pledged to enhance its infrastructure to ensure all sequencers in the cluster can take on block-building responsibilities when needed.

While the outage was brief, it has drawn attention from members of the crypto community, some of whom see it as a sign of growing adoption. 0xrooter, a former Coinbase engineer and founder of Save Finance, commented that outages often occur on chains with real user activity, suggesting that the event is a positive indicator of Base’s growing usage. Others, including Mert Mumtaz, CEO of Helius Labs, compared the incident to past outages on Solana, another high-throughput blockchain that has faced similar challenges.

Base’s engineering lead, known on X as “aflock,” emphasized the importance of network uptime for supporting a global economy and expressed pride in the team’s quick response to the issue. The team also indicated that it has identified several methods to further harden the network’s infrastructure moving forward.

Despite the outage, Base remains one of the most active blockchains for retail users, with 1.09 million active addresses, according to DefiLlama. It ranks sixth in DeFi TVL, with $4.1 billion locked in its ecosystem. Meanwhile, Solana, which has also faced network disruptions, maintains the second-highest DeFi TVL at $9.6 billion and the highest number of active addresses at 2.83 million.

The incident serves as a reminder of the challenges associated with scaling decentralized systems and maintaining high availability. While Base’s response followed standard protocol—identifying the cause, resolving the issue, and communicating with users—it also revealed potential weaknesses in its current infrastructure. The lack of a detailed technical analysis of the sequencer failure leaves some uncertainty about whether similar incidents could occur in the future.

Source: [1] Base blames faulty sequencer for 33-minute outage, fixes made (https://cointelegraph.com/news/base-blames-faulty-sequencer-33-minute-network-outage?utm_source=rss_feed&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss_partner_inbound)