A technical upgrade on Polygon resulted in a network outage for over 11 hours, leaving users in the dark. The network developers on March 10 notified its users that there would likely be downtime due to maintenance on one of the network’s three layers.
They suspect a bug in the upgrade affecting consensus and causing different Heimdall validators to be on different versions of the chain. Thus, it did not reach 2/3 consensus. In its latest update, the Polygon team said it was working to fix the error. The team highlighted that the network has deployed a hotfix to help continue making blocks.
The Polygon network told its users that all funds and data on-chain are safe. Users have expressed concerns about the extended amount of time for the outage. Some highlighted that Polygons have been down for six hours and counting. Others pointed out that their profession or crypto business has been hit by the outage. A user tweeted that he has been literally unable to work because of the outage and requested a time frame as to when the network would be up and working again.
Experts say the Polygon network is made up of three layers, with each playing a unique role. Smart contracts run on the Ethereum layer and Bor layer. The problem lies in Heimdall – the third layer which is a set of proof-of-stake (PoS) nodes. Polygon cannot reach a network consensus because of the Heimdall issue.
A previous, similar, bug had nearly cost the Polygon network $24 billion worth of funds.
