Beginning at 10:14 AM Eastern today (September 14, 2021) and continuing for approximately 45 minutes, the Arbitrum Sequencer was offline. Arbitrum released a report on network failures, pointing out that the root cause of the downtime was that the Sequencer received a large number of transactions in a short period of time. Sequencer never has the ability to steal funds or forge transactions, because every transaction it handles is digitally signed by a user and the signatures are checked by the Arbitrum chain, and at no point were user funds at risk. Furthermore, the Arbitrum bridge continued to operate during this period, and no deposits or withdrawals were lost or at risk at any point.

By Amy Liu