Polygon’s Network Was Down For 11 Hours And Here’s Why

Polygon’s network was down for 11 hours yesterday and today and in our latest blockchain news, we find out why.

Polygon’s network was down between March 10 and March 11 but the platform noted that all of the users’ funds are safe and the team explained the particular issues for which the network was not operational between 11 hours. The Polygon developers notified the users of a upcomign potential downtime for the network because of the network upgrade which is a Heimdall node.

The Heimdall implementation is used by one of the two layers of the PoS chain and the team confirmed that the downtime happened and provided further clarifications. It is also worth noting that no user funds were compromised during this outage. The team wrote:

“While we are working on identifying the definitive cause, it seems to have originated from an earlier upgrade consisting of a minot parameterization fix to the Ethereum to Polygon PoS state sync/bridging module.”

The team revealed that there’s a bug in the upgrade which could have had an effect ont the consensus and led to different Heimdall validators on the different versions of the blockchain which prevented them from reaching 2/3 consensus. When using Tendermint consensus, the situation could cause the Heimdall chain to halt. The developers reaffirmed that Heimdall doesn’t handle users’ transactions but is used for validator-related transactions. Furthermore, the team explained that the Bor Chain used for a user-facing PoS chain of Polygon, halted because it relies on Heimdall for the block proposer committee selection.

The team successfully released a hotfix that restored operations on the Polygon network but the Bridge itself will not be active until the issue is fully resolved. The update reads:

“We appreciate your support during this time and have an update: we have deployed a temporary hotfix to unblock the Bor chain and resume producing blocks on the Polygon chain. While this solution is temporary, the team is working on implementing a longer-term upgrade to fix the Heimdall issue.”

As recently reported, Adobe is a leading software company that announced that it will be working with Polygon to integrate the Ethereum scaling program in its Behance social media platform. The integration will allow creators to showcase NFT tokens to the world while lowering the carbon footprint and the transaction fees. NFTs are unique tokens that exist on the blockchain and signify ownership of the asset.