Starknet Team Details Cause of Recent Network Outage

Starknet Publishes Post-Mortem Report After Temporary Network Interruption

Recently, the team behind Starknet, a layer-2 scaling network on Ethereum, published a report detailing the cause of a temporary outage of the main network. The issue stemmed from a discrepancy in the network state between the execution layer and the verification layer, resulting in incorrect transaction behavior.

According to the report, the Starknet team explained that "in a specific combination of calls between functions, variable writes, and reverts, the blockifier retained a state that occurred within a function that was canceled, leading to incorrect transaction execution." A graphic illustrates how the code bug affected the network.

Thanks to Starknet's verification layer, this incorrect execution did not reach L1 finality, with the team emphasizing that the verification layer functioned correctly by signaling the error and preventing faulty transactions from being recorded in the ledger. The incident led to a block reorganization, requiring a rollback to network activity from the past 18 minutes.

Starknet has since returned to normal functionality, but the incident has prompted the team to commit to further testing and code audits to prevent similar issues in the future. This interruption also highlights the challenges faced in programming for new generations of blockchain networks, which include multi-layer technology stacks.