zkSync Went Down For 5 Hours On Christmas Day But Is Now Back Online

A bug in zkSync’s software caused a security protocol to be erroneously triggered, crashing the network and leaving it offline for several hours on Christmas day.

Developers of the zkSync network got an unwelcomed Christmas present on Dec. 25. 

The network went offline, requiring the team to “inspect” it during the holiday to determine what went wrong, according to a Christmas Day announcement from the team. 

As per the team, zkSync was back up and running after approximately five hours.

The zkSync Era network is now fully operational. At 05:50 UTC, one of the network’s automated safety protocols was triggered by a bug in the server. This issue required teams to inspect and is now fully resolved.

We will share a full post-mortem report soon. Thank you for your…

— zkSync Developers (∎, ∆) (@zkSyncDevs) December 25, 2023

At 7:36 am UTC, the zkSync team posted an announcement on X (formerly Twitter) stating that the network was “currently encountering network issues.” 

zkSync Era is currently encountering network issues.

Teams are actively addressing the situation and are committed to resolving it as swiftly as possible.

We will share a post-mortem report once the issue has been fully addressed and analyzed.

For updates:…

— zkSync Developers (∎, ∆) (@zkSyncDevs) December 25, 2023

They claimed they were “actively addressing the situation” and were “committed” to getting it back online. At 10:52 am UTC, the team posted another message, stating that the issue was resolved. 

“[O]ne of the network’s automated safety protocols was triggered by a bug in the server,” the post stated, adding that the network was now “fully operational.” 

See Also: Pudgy Penguins Announces ‘Pudgy World’ Web3 Game On zkSync Blockchain

According to the message, the crash had occurred at 5:50 UTC, which implies that zkSync was down for approximately five hours.

Shutdowns and crashes affecting blockchain networks have occurred several times over the course of 2023. 

In January, Solana suffered a four-hour outage from a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. In March, Polygon went down for more than 11 hours because of a bug introduced during a hard fork. 

And on Dec. 15, a sudden burst of inscription minting caused Ethereum layer-2 Abitrum to go down for 78 minutes.