Polygon (MATIC) Network Witnesses Serious Outage Following Upgrade

Polygon (MATIC) network has been experiencing severe network outages over the past 12 hours due to a technical upgrade on the platform. The team says the bug has only affected the Heimdall node and as such, all user funds and data on the network remain absolutely safe.

Polygon Suffers Extended Network Outage

Polygon  (MATIC), an Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution that claims to be focused on solving common blockchain pain points while also offering users low fees and high speeds without sacrificing security, is experiencing a serious network outage.

On March 10, 2022, at exactly 4:20 pm UTC, the Polygon network development team notified the public via the project’s forum that there will be a network outage starting from 5:50 pm UTC on that day, as the team plans to carry out maintenance work to fix the bug on the Heimdall node.

“Polygon PoS users will likely experience downtime starting at 5:50 PM UTC on March 10th due to an issue with the Heimdall implementation. Note that all user funds and data remain fully secure. The Polygon team is actively working on a solution and will share an update on ETA as soon as we can,” stated the team.

Explaining further, the Polygon PoS team made it clear that it’s looking into an anomaly in the Heimdall implementation which has forced the Heimdall node to stop functioning entirely. 

For those who are unaware, the Polygon network is made up of three layers namely the Ethereum layer, the Bor layer, and the Heimdall layer, with each of them serving a specific purpose in the Polygon ecosystem.

The Ethereum layer handles smart contracts, the Bor layer facilitates block production, while the Heimdall layer houses PoS nodes that help the network reach consensus.

“Although still under investigation by the team, we suspect, there may have been a bug in the upgrade which affected consensus, and caused different Heimdall validators to be on different versions of the chain, thereby not reaching ⅔ consensus,” explains the Polygon devs.

“When using Tendermint consensus, this situation will cause the Heimdall chain to halt. Note that Heimdall does not handle user transactions. It is used for validator-related transactions and bridging,” they added.

Polygon Users Lament

As expected the unfortunate situation has triggered serious worries in the hearts of Polygon faithful, with some taking to Twitter to express their displeasure over the matter, while some users have questioned the competence of the Polygon dev team.

“For the 16th largest crypto by market cap, you would think the higher-ups would consider hiring devs who could solve such an issue quickly without having to shut the entire network down for over three hours and counting. Imagine the chaos that would ensue if Visa decided to go offline and block all of the transactions they’d normally process for over three hours,” declared Polygon community member @RandallQueef.

About nine hours ago, the Polygon team announced that they had managed to formulate a temporary solution to the problem and are working on implementing a longer-term upgrade to fix the Heimdall issue.

At press time, the price of Polygon’s MATIC token is hovering around $1.44, with a market cap of $11.05 billion, as seen on CoinMarketCap.