Starknet outage marks second major disruption since Grinta rollout

Starknet developers are currently investigating a complete network halt that has stopped block production for hours, marking its second major outage in roughly four months.

In a brief statement on X, the Starknet team acknowledged the issue, stating, "Starknet is currently experiencing downtime. Our team is actively investigating the issue and working to restore full functionality as quickly as possible."

The Block has reached out for further comment on the root cause.

A pattern of growing pains

Starknet's previous outage on September 2 was triggered by its ambitious Grinta upgrade.

According to the team's post-mortem, the failure stemmed from a sequence of issues: Ethereum node failures caused a divergence between its three new sequencers, a subsequent manual intervention introduced inconsistencies, and a bug in the blockifier software compounded the problem, ultimately requiring two separate chain reorganizations.

At the time, StarkWare contributor Abdelhamid Bakhta acknowledged the severity bluntly on X, writing, “It sucks, plain and simple.” He framed the disruption as an inevitable cost of innovation, stating, “No one has decentralized a ZK rollup architecture on a live chain before. Setbacks come with the territory.” Bakhta compared the situation to Solana’s history of outages, quipping, “Bullish on Starknet downtime. Solana playbook, all planned.”

Starknet is not alone among Ethereum Layer 2 networks in facing downtime. Base experienced a 33-minute outage in August due to a sequencer error, Linea paused block production for about an hour in September, Polygon zkEVM suffered a sequencer-related halt in March 2024, and Arbitrum faced a 90-minute disruption earlier this year from transaction surges.

Despite these hiccups, Starknet executed a series of major technical upgrades throughout 2025. These included the stateful compression of data blobs in March, achieving "Stage 1" decentralization status in May, and the landmark Grinta upgrade in September, which introduced a decentralized sequencer architecture, sub-second pre-confirmations, and a new fee market. The November integration of its S-two prover brought a claimed 100x efficiency gain.

The ecosystem also secured key partnerships, integrating with interoperability protocols like LayerZero, Hyperlane, and Circle's CCTP for native USDC, and forming collaborations with entities including Blockstream, Privy, and the Bitcoin wallet Xverse.

Starknet, developed by StarkWare, has been live since 2021. It was co-founded by Eli Ben-Sasson, who also co-created the privacy-focused protocol Zcash in 2014. Its native token, STRK, is used for paying transaction fees, staking in its dual-token consensus model with Bitcoin, and governance.

As of press time, STRK was trading at approximately $0.08, down over 20% in the past month and nearly 98% from its all-time high of $3.66 in February 2024, according to The Block’s prices page.