Layer-2 zkSync Post Mortems Christmas Day Network Outage

Ethereum layer-2 network zkSync Era suffered an outage this week, which was triggered by one of the network’s automated safety procedures, according to the team.

The zkSync Era team got an unwanted Christmas present on December 25 when the network suffered a five-hour outage.

Systems are running normally now, and the team has provided a post-mortem explaining what knocked the layer-2 network offline.

zkSync Post-Mortem

According to the explanation, there was “an edge-case bug in how the operator computed the state update.” The problem was a subtle, relatively simple software bug related to state updates, it added.

It confirmed that no funds were at risk, and the problem has been resolved.

“The sequencer was fully operational but acted too defensively based on a now unnecessary safety procedure. The team addressed the issue, and the network was immediately healthy again. No funds were ever at risk.”

The defensive posture was overly cautious given the network’s current maturity, the team stated. Moreover, the execution delay provided time to address issues without halting operations, but resolving this took longer due to the holiday period.

Find out more: What Is zkSync?

The statement said,

“Once we fixed the issue, we immediately published an updated version of the node software so that other node operators could deploy the changes.”

zkSync was among a number of networks, including Arbitrum and Cronos, to suffer outages during the inscriptions craze earlier this month.

Degens flocked to various blockchains to inscribe memecoins, testing throughput to the limits, and some blockchains failed to handle it.

Layer-2 Ecosystem Outlook

According to L2beat, zkSync Era ranks as the fourth largest layer-2 with a total value locked of $565 million.

The network was launched in alpha on March 24, and TVL soared to an all-time high of $735 million by early July. While falling from that peak, zkSync TVL has been trending up for the past two months.

The network also had a rocky start with a security breach and third-party project rug pull.

zkSync has a market share of 3%, which is way behind market leaders Arbitrum One and Optimism. The two Ethereum scaling networks have a combined market share of around 80%.

Moreover, layer-2 ecosystem TVL has also just hit a new all-time high of $18.5 billion. This represents a gain of more than 300% so far in 2023, outpacing DeFi and crypto markets.