Polygon’s consensus layer is back online after a bug in the network’s validation mechanism knocked it offline for an hour on Wednesday. During the outage, the network’s Heimdall service, which manages validators and syncs the blockchain with Ethereum, became unresponsive. “Heimdall experienced a temporary disruption that led to a one-hour halt in chain progression, caused by a validator exit,” the Polygon Foundation, a non-profit tasked with supporting the Polygon blockchain, said in an X post.
A Polygon spokesperson told DL News that the network was not programmed to account for a validator exit because it is a rare event, and triggered a false alarm as a result. Other blockchains, like Ethereum, regularly handle validator exits with no issues. “At no point did the chain lose liveliness, i.e. the ability to execute transactions, although explorers being down may have given people this incorrect view,” the spokesperson said. When blockchains go offline it can be a blow to user confidence.
Polygon users have piled more than $1.4 billion onto the blockchain on the assumption that they will be able to move or withdraw those funds at any time. So when a blockchain goes down, those funds are stuck until it comes back online. Such situations have previously cost users dearly. Futures exchange Hyperliquid announced on Wednesday a plan to refund users who lost money after a 37 minute outage on Tuesday resulted in dozens of delayed trades. Solana has also experienced several outages in recent years, with many traders reporting financial losses because they were unable to close or alter leveraged trades placed through DeFi protocols while the network was offline.
Polygon launched in October 2017 and was among the first cohort of blockchains to offer cheaper transactions than Ethereum. It’s not the first time parts of Polygon have gone down. In 2022, the network experienced an 11 hour outage caused by a bug in a planned upgrade. In March 2024, Polygon’s zkEVM network also suffered a 10 hour drop in service, which its developers attributed to an issue with the blockchain’s sequencer. Polygon’s POL token is down 2.5% on the day.
