Developers reported on May 11 that Ethereum (ETH) transactions could not be fully confirmed for 25 minutes. Throughout the failure, users risked being ‘swapped’.
Ethereum failed to complete transactions for 25 minutes
On the evening of May 11, Ethereum developers announced that they had identified a problem and were investigating the root cause. Several Ethereum developers reported that Beacon Chain, a branch of Ethereum that uses the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) mechanism, has paused transactions and are investigating the issue.
The event lasted about 25 minutes. Later, Ether contributor terence.eth said that the issue is now resolved. Some Ethereum core developers announced on Twitter that the network was not terminated and they were investigating the issue. A similar issue in the past caused an error in a client, the software that runs Ethereum.
Deploying more nodes – steady lads
— ansgar.eth 🦇🔊 .oO (@adietrichs) May 11, 2023
The problem was on the Beacon Chain
An unidentified problem in Ethereum’s Beacon Chain led to an issue with transaction finality for about half an hour on May 11. Around 11:15 p.m. on May 11, a number of Ether core developers announced that Beacon Chain is experiencing issues confirming transactions. New blocks could be proposed, but an unknown issue prevented them from being finalized.
https://twitter.com/superphiz/status/16567614242222253064
A similar problem occurred on March 15. Low validator participation rates caused a delay in the Goerli testnet version of Ethereum’s “Shapella” upgrade on April 12.
Beacon Chain is Ethereum’s original proof-of-work Blockchain, first released in 2020. On September 15, 2022, Ethereum’s pre-existing proof-of-work chain “merged” with the Beacon Chain, completing the network’s transition to a faster system.
Ethereum blocks begin to ‘end’ once again
After 25 minutes, the Ethereum mainnet started finalizing and processing blocks once again. The announcement came from Preston Van Loon, Eth core developer and Prysmatic Labs co-founder.
Finality has been restored. We do not know the root cause yet, but something happened to cause several client implementations to work really hard to keep up with the chain.
— prestonvanloon.eth (@preston_vanloon) May 11, 2023
According to data from blockchain analytics provider Beaconchain, the Eth period from 200,552 to 200,554 witnessed a sharp and sudden drop in the number of attestations. An era is a period of 32 “slots” where validators propose and approve blocks. A period typically lasts about six minutes and 24 seconds.
The cause of the issue remains unclear, but Eth developers said that the issue is being investigated to prevent it from reoccurring.
“We got ahead of the hard fork”
After the incident, the alias Ether advisor Superphiz explained the reason for the outage. He stated that one of the main reasons why the ‘loss of certainty’ lasted so short was the ‘customer diversity’. However, he also pointed out that it can be completely avoided if no customer has more than 33% control.
Client diversity refers to the number of software clients available to network validators. More diversity between clients means a more secure and robust network for validators.
If a consensus layer client caused the loss of finality:
* We averted a fork by not having a supermajority client
* We could have avoided the loss of finality entirely if no client had more than 33%.
I'm proud of our diversity work, but we're not done. https://t.co/TUtXnQu5hD
— superphiz.eth 🦇🔊🛡️ (@superphiz) May 11, 2023
cryptocoin.com As you follow, Ether has experienced other outages in the past: it suffered a DDOS attack in 2016 and saw partial outages related to Infura in November 2020. An attack on the DAO in 2016 also greatly affected Ethereum.
