What To Know:
- Starknet faced a nearly three-hour outage today.
- This outage comes in after a similar incident on September 2 due to a sequencer failure tied to Cairo0 code.
- The incident caused a chain reorganization and forced users to resubmit affected transactions.
Starknet, an Ethereum Layer 2 network, experienced a major service disruption today. The downtime left users unable to process transactions for nearly 2 hours.
Starknet Suffers Major Outage For Nearly 2 Hours
Starknet is currently experiencing downtime. Our team is actively investigating the issue and working to restore full functionality as quickly as possible. Thank you for your patience.
— Starknet (BTCFi arc) 🥷 (@Starknet) January 5, 2026
Based on the most recent information provided by the firm, the Starknet team is in the process of investigating the problem and re-establishing full functionality as soon as possible. The downtime was the third significant network failure in less than four months, adding fresh pressure to the project as it maintains its position as a scaling solution for Ethereum.
On September 02, the network faced a similar issue, which was first acknowledged in a post on Starknet’s official X account where the team confirmed the outage and that engineers were now investigating it. Users were requested a level of patience, as everyone was working to get everything back as possible. Later updates blamed the disruption on a failure in Starknet’s sequencer, which is a core component that orders and batches transactions before they are finalized on the network. The sequencer couldn’t handle Cairo0 code, which is the key to running transactions and halted activity across the chain.
The September outage started around 2:23 AM to 4:36 AM UTC. In this period, the users also described stalled transactions and sluggish block production. The network underwent a reorganization at block 1,960,612, leading to nearly one hour lost history of transactions as it had continued to experience the aforementioned issue. Once the root cause was identified, Starknet engineers moved fast. A solution was implemented and the network slowly regained normal service within hours. Subsequently, the team validated that block production had been restarted and that most RPC providers were up and running with the remainder expected to go online soon.
“The network is back online and fully operational,” Starknet said in an update. “Most RPC providers are up-and-running, and the remaining ones will upgrade shortly. All transactions from block 1,960,612 onward will need to be resubmitted.”
The requirement to resubmit transactions added another layer of disruption for users, particularly those interacting with DeFi applications or time-sensitive smart contracts.
Transactions impacted by the reorganization were not made visible on-chain, forcing users to manually retry them once services were restored. This current breach has increased the focus on Starknet’s operational stability. As a side note, the outage in September came after a minor setback on July 18, when Starknet experienced slow block creation and gateway issues for about 13 minutes. And although it was a temporary disruption, the recurrence of the problems in a short period of time has attracted some attention about the difficulties of sustaining intricate Layer 2 infrastructure.
Starknet and other Layer 2 networks are attempting to alleviate congestion on Ethereum by processing transactions off-chain before settling them on the mainnet.
The model offers lower fees and increased throughput, but it also imposes technical dependencies like sequencers which can become single points of failure. No loss of user funds on Starknet account is reported for the outage. As a result, continued service disruptions could undermine that trust, especially as competition among Ethereum scaling solutions continues to intensify. They have not specified either additional protection, as well as architectural changes, to ensure this never happens again. The most immediate concern still is a return-to-normal focus on getting operations stable and offering users confidence in a network that can continue growing without frequent outages.
Also Read: Flow Foundation Unveils Revised Recovery Plan After Network Attack
