The Arbitrum (ARB) network experienced a “partial outage” on Friday due to an increase in transaction traffic affecting the layer-2 blockchain’s sequencer.
The project’s sequencer stopped “during a significant increase in network traffic,” according to a statement from the network’s Arbitrum on Friday. “We are working to resolve it as quickly as possible and will provide a post-mortem as soon as possible,” a post on Arbitrum’s current web page said.
Sequencers are likened to an “air traffic control” that decides which transactions occur first on layer-2 networks like Arbitrum.
The outage caused chaos and confusion in the Arbitrum community. The previously planned “Ask Me a Question” event, which was supposed to take place at 20:00, was suddenly canceled by an Arbitrum employee shortly after it started. The Arbitrum Discord was flooded with messages from investors afraid of what would happen to their positions when the network came back online.
Arbitrum’s sequencer last froze in June due to unconfirmed transactions.