Starknet Faces Second Major Outage in Two Months

Another Halt on Ethereum’s Layer-2

Starknet, Ethereum’s seventh-largest scaling network, went offline again this week. The mainnet froze for nearly three hours, stopping block production and leaving transactions stuck in limbo.

Sequencer at the Center

The culprit was Starknet’s sequencer — basically the traffic cop for transactions. It failed to read “Cairo0 code,” a key part of the system’s logic, causing the breakdown.

Not the First Time

This isn’t Starknet’s first stumble. On July 18, the mainnet stalled for 13 minutes. But this latest pause lasted two hours and 44 minutes, raising questions about reliability for a network holding $548M in value.

What Starknet Runs On

Starknet uses a method called ZK-rollups (with STARK proofs). Think of it as compressing many transactions into one, making Ethereum cheaper and faster. That’s the promise — but outages are testing investor patience.

Back Online, but With a Catch

Starknet says the network is now fully operational. But users who sent transactions during the outage need to resubmit them. A reorganization of one hour of blockchain activity was rolled back. The team promises a full post-mortem soon.