Polygon zkEVM blockchain resumes operation following 10-hour outage

Polygon zkEVM, the Ethereum Layer 2 network which was launched a year ago this week, suffered a recent network outage that saw its nascent blockchain grind to a halt for over ten hours.

Polygon zkEVM's block explorer shows an outage of about ten hours on March 23 between when consecutive blocks were successfully sequenced and added to the chain. x

The Polygon zkEVM team has officially acknowledged the outage in a post on X, which reads in part, "Polygon zkEVM Mainnnet Beta faced an issue with its sequencer due to an L1 reorg. We are working on fully resolving the issue and will follow up with a detailed post-mortem."

Launched on March 27, 2023 with a symbolic first transaction by Vitalik Buterin, Polygon zkEVM is a zero-knowledge scaling rollup solution that's compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine, or EVM. However, Polygon zkEVM has failed to gain the traction of similar Layer 2 networks, seeing far fewer transactions than its competitors, according to The Block's data dashboard. 

The Polygon zkEVM outage did not affect Polygon's main blockchain or any chains designed with Polygon's Chain Development Kit (CDK). "We look forward to our release of the second gen zkEVM in the coming weeks," the company wrote.