Starknet, Ethereum’s Layer-2 scaling solution, faced a 3-hour outage after its Grinta upgrade, its second major downtime in two months.
Author: Sahil Thakur
Starknet, Ethereum’s seventh-largest Layer-2 network, faced a downtime for nearly three hours on Tuesday, marking its second major outage in under two months. The disruption follows the deployment of the Grinta upgrade (v0.14.0), a major milestone aimed at decentralizing the protocol.
The outage lasted 2 hours and 44 minutes, beginning around 2:23 AM UTC. Starknet’s sequencer, responsible for ordering and processing transactions – failed to function, halting block production entirely.
All transactions between block 1,960,612 and 4:36 AM UTC were lost and must be resubmitted, following a full chain reorganization. This rollback effectively erased an hour’s worth of blockchain activity.
Grinta had introduced core architectural changes, including a revamped sequencer, mempool logic, and a redesigned fee structure, all aimed at improving decentralization.
The incident follows a 13-minute stall in July, which was previously the network’s most significant disruption. Two back-to-back outages have intensified scrutiny over whether high-performance Ethereum scaling solutions can maintain both speed and operational resilience.
Starknet currently holds over $548 million in total value locked, according to L2Beat data. Its growing ecosystem and rising ambitions make operational stability critical to long-term adoption.
By early Tuesday morning, the Starknet team confirmed that the network had returned to full functionality.
“Block production is back to normal. Most RPC providers are up-and-running,” the team stated on X. “Transactions submitted during the outage were not processed and must be resubmitted.”
The team pledged to publish a detailed post-mortem in the coming days, covering the timeline, technical root cause, and prevention measures.
The outage comes shortly after Starknet’s governance community approved SNIP-31, a proposal to integrate Bitcoin staking. The network is positioning itself as a future-proof L2 with multi-chain interoperability and modular architecture.
But the Grinta incident highlights a broader risk: complex upgrades, even those aimed at decentralization can expose critical weaknesses during rollout.
Whether Starknet can balance innovation with stability may define its role in Ethereum’s scaling roadmap going forward.
<<-chart-{starknet}->>
This downtime on the starknet network is not the only major blockchain that has faced issue in 2025.
| Project | Date / Period | Duration | Key Cause / Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starknet (L2, Ethereum) | September 2, 2025 | ~2 hr 44 min – 4 hours | Sequencer failure due to Cairo0 code incompatibility after Grinta v0.14 upgrade |
| TON (The Open Network) | June 2025 | ~40 minutes | Masterchain dispatch queue error; resolved via validator patch |
| Polygon zkEVM | 2025 (unspecified date) | ~12 hours | Sequencer failure caused by Ethereum chain split |
| Polygon PoS | July 30, 2025 | ~1 hour | Validator exit bug in Heimdall layer; RPC and explorer outages |
| Solana | Various (Q1 2025 noted) | Multiple events, some up to 13 hours | Not officially acknowledged; third-party monitors flagged RPC/API degradation |
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