The Ethereum Scaling ProtocolPolygon has reported that its zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) is now unavailable owing to a problem with the blockchain sequencer.Polygon reminded its two million followers on X that the problem is limited to the zkEVM and has no bearing on any other chains deployed using the Polygon chain development kit (CDK).
“This only impacts Polygon zkEVM (which is the only rollup) and does not impact Polygon PoS, Polygon CDK, or any chain that has deployed using Polygon CDK.”
Polygon confirmed that the issue stems from the blockchain sequencer, which organizes and combines transactions into batches before sending them to the Polygon zkEVM smart contract on Ethereum’s main network.The blockchain platform stressed that it is trying to properly remedy the issue and has pledged to provide a comprehensive “post-mortem” statement once it has been resolved.
Several X users speculated on why the crypto community had been silent during the unexpectedly protracted network outage.
A user on X, 0xngmiasked his 101,900 followers “why is nobody talking about how Polygon zkevm has been down for 10h and is still down?” While another user who goes by the username Mirza.inj, highlighted to his 14,800 followers why “Polygon zkEVM was down for over 10 hours and no one said anything.”
This comes just one month after the Solana network had a major outage.On February 6, Cointelegraph claimed that block generation on the Solana network was suspended for more than five hours before being restored by validators.Solana has experienced around six severe outages since January 2022.Polygon added the zkEVM to its mainnet beta in March 2023, allowing developers to deploy smart contracts with more certainty and at a cheaper cost.
Following its release, Cointelegraph stated that it replicates Ethereum’s mainnet’s transaction execution environment. Polygon claimed that the open-source zkEVM enables decentralized apps (DApps) to scale through transaction batching, resulting in increased performance.