Base blamed a 33-minute outage on Tuesday on an unprepared sequencer. The blockchain team said it would update the infrastructure
Coinbase’s Ethereum layer-2 blockchain Base stopped producing blocks for 33 minutes on Tuesday after switching to a backup sequencer that wasn’t set up properly to process transactions.
The incident began at 6:07 am UTC when the active sequencer started falling behind on block production, prompting Conductor — Base’s system for managing sequencer availability and reliability — to switch sequencers.
Still, it switched to an “unhealthy mainnet sequencer” that was still being set up and wasn’t able to produce blocks, Base Build’s X account said in a post on Tuesday.
Base is still highly centralized
The incident exposed Base’s reliance on centralized sequencers to handle transactions at scale. While multiple sequencers run, they rely entirely on Conductor’s management capabilities, creating a single point of failure that can halt the entire network.
The team behind Base, which currently secures more than $4.1 billion of total value locked, said it would update its infrastructure to ensure all sequencers in the cluster can handle block-building responsibilities if selected.
Base’s only other major network outage occurred on Sept. 5, 2023, shortly after its public launch, when block production was halted for 43 minutes.
Accountability taken by Base leader
Base’s head of engineering, who goes by “aflock” on X, said that Base takes chain uptime very seriously, adding that it can’t “power a global economy without a solid backbone of a network.”
