Arbitrum network experienced a 78-minute outage due to inscriptions.

The Ethereum layer-2 network Arbitrum One encountered an outage on December 15 lasting around 78 minutes, but it is now operational again, as stated by the network’s Discord community manager, Ricardo “Gordan.” Gas fees on the network remain unusually elevated, but are expected to “normalize.”

Message from Arbitrum community manager. Source: Arbitrum Discord.

The sequencer experienced a “stall” at 10:29 am ET (13:29 UTC) due to a “significant surge in network traffic,” as indicated by an alert on Arbitrum’s official status page. By 5:58 pm UTC, Arbitrum’s block explorer, Arbiscan, indicated that some blocks were being generated, although they seemed to be processing only two transactions per block.

Arbitrum outage alert. Source: Arbitrum

Some users took to X (Twitter) to theorize whether the outage was linked to inscriptions, which would account for the limited number of transactions in each block. This was later verified by the team. Inscriptions are a specific data format utilized in certain blockchain networks, often for carrying collectible images. Initially originating on Bitcoin, inscriptions have recently been adopted on Arbitrum through the MemeOrdi protocol.

As per blockchain analytics platform Layer2Beat, Arbitrum users can withdraw their assets to Ethereum even if the sequencer is non-functional, although this process will require 24 hours. If proposer validators are also inactive, the withdrawal will take at least six days, eight hours, 43 minutes, and 36 seconds. The network experienced downtime for less than two hours.

Update (Dec. 15, 8:34 pm UTC): This article has been revised to incorporate a statement from the team confirming that the network is operational.

This is an ongoing story, and additional information will be provided as it becomes available.