Arbitrum says all systems are operational after 'surge of inscriptions' caused outage earlier in day

Arbitrum ARB +2.47% , a layer-2 blockchain on Ethereum, said Friday that all systems were operational after a sustained surge of Bitcoin Ordinals-inspired inscriptions triggered a sequencer to stop, resulting in a temporary outage that lasted about an hour and a half. 

Hildobby, a pseudonymous data researcher at VC firm Dragonfly, said in a post on X that 90% of transactions had been inscriptions before the chain stopped.

"Hourly inscriptions on Arbitrum were ramping up in the hours leading up to its halt," they wrote, noting that an inscription called "fair" had been the one that triggered the halt. 

Gas prices stabilized 

Arbitrum said in a status update Friday afternoon that gas prices on the network had stabilized, with all operations now "back to normal." It’s continuing to gather more information and will provide a full "post-mortem" in the coming days. 

"Today was a tough day. A lot of lessons learned and work to do to make sure Arbitrum can deliver the excellence people rightfully expect. Engineering in web3 is hard, but we're all in this together to build a better future," co-founder and chief technology officer of Offchain Labs Harry Kalodner wrote on X.

Ordinals-like tokens have previously caused problems on the Telegram Open Network (TON) blockchain. On Dec. 7, the blockchain slowed to one transaction per second after users flooded it with inscriptions. The same kind of transactions caused volumes and gas fees to spike on Polygon last month.