outage

Polygonscan went down, causing unwarranted concern of blockchain outage

Data from PolygonScan showed that the blockchain had not produced any new blocks or processed transactions for some time, leading some to believe it was suffering an outage.

Update: The article was updated at 11:45pm UTC on Feb. 22 to reflect that the blockchain explorer Polygonscan was not updating correctly. Polygon has continued to produce blocks, according to OKLINK.

An outage at network explorer Polygonscan led to unfounded speculation that the Polygon blockchain was temporarily down for the count. 

Rumors surfaced on Feb. 22 that layer-2 scaling solution Polygon may have been suffering an outage after data from PolygonScan purportedly showed the blockchain had not processed a block in over an hour and a half.

The team at Polygon has since clarified that the issue came from “a few nodes” falling out of sync and that blockchain production has not stopped.

“About 8:26 UTC, a few nodes went out of sync. This caused a reaction where some nodes could not validate blocks for a very brief period of time,” a Polygon spokesperson told Cointelegraph.

“Block production never stopped – However, there could have been a degradation in network performance temporarily. These nodes have resynced and systems are back to normal.”

The spokesperson said the team was also aware that Polygonscan is down, but alternative explorers can be used.

“We are working with Polygonscan to bring them back up,” said the spokesperson.

Speculation of a possible outage first emerged on Feb. 22, with some pointing to an apparent halt in block production based on data from Polyscan — which showed the blockchain’s last block and transaction was processed at around 8:35 pm UTC on Feb. 22.

Latest blocks and transactions on Polygon. Source: Polygonscan

The network has previously suffered network outages, with the last occurring on March 11, 2022, due to maintenance required on one of the network’s three layers.

Polygon Labs, the crypto firm behind the Polygon blockchain, announced on Feb. 21 that it was letting go 20% of its workforce, or approximately 100 positions.

WhatsApp down again? Google searches spike after the outage

As WhatsApp goes down once again, there are a number of alternative platforms that are popular alternatives in the cryptocurrency space.

Some 2 billion WhatsApp users were left without service on Oct. 25 as the biggest messaging application worldwide went offline. Meta, the owner of Facebook and WhatsApp, has yet to clarify what led to the outage.

Users took to social media platforms like Twitter to share hilarious memes about the outage, with many flocking to alternative platforms to find out if they were alone in their lack of service. A similar situation took place in October 2021 when Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp went down for more than 24 hours due to a “server configuration change.”

This time around, the outage was fairly short-lived, with WhatsApp restoring messaging services within a few hours of the initial outage. Nevertheless, questions about alternative messaging applications came to the fore once again.

Google Trends data highlights the surge in searches relating to WhatsApp around the globe on Oct. 25 as users tried to find out what had happened to the world’s most popular messaging app. Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, Italy, the Netherlands, Pakistan and South Africa were among the countries with the highest number of WhatsApp-related queries following the blackout.

The cryptocurrency community has long held privacy and encryption in high regard, and as such, a number of WhatsApp competitors have been increasingly endorsed as alternatives. 

Telegram has grown its user base steadily over the past few years, with founder and CEO Pavel Durov pinning the platform’s user base at 700 million users in October 2022. Telegram allows users to send end-to-end encrypted messages, photos and videos; share files; and create large groups or channels of up to 200,000 people for broadcasting purposes.

RelatedThis is what your email could look like in Web3

Signal commands a user base of some 40 million people around the world, and its privacy features are touted as industry-leading. Its open-source, end-to-end encryption means that Signal and third parties cannot read or listen to a user’s messages or conversations.

Discord is a growing player in the instant messaging app space, already popular among gamers as a major voice-over-IP service. The platform is touted as serving over 140 million users that make use of its voice and video calls, text messaging, media and file sharing capabilities, and server hosting.

Line is another alternative messaging service used by some 178 million users across East Asia. It integrates text messaging and voice and video calls with a bouquet of services, including a wallet app, gaming and music streaming services.

A decentralized alternative that bypasses the need for central servers or services is also an option. Keet, developed by Bitfinex- and Tether-backed development firm Holepunch, offers a desktop-based peer-to-peer messaging application for text and video calling.

Celo network back online after almost 24-hour outage

It was the first time the Celo mainnet had gone down in more than two years.

Proof-of-stake- (PoS)-based blockchain Celo has been suffering from an on-and-off network outage lasting 24 hours, though the blockchain appears to be up and running again. 

Celo is an open-source blockchain that enables users with phone numbers to make payments with crypto by using their phone numbers as a proxy for public keys.

Celo updated its Twitter followers after the network came back online, noting it was the network’s first outage since the mainnet launch on April 22, 2020, and that it has begun a “thorough and expedited technical analysis” to get to the bottom of the issue.

The protocol made the initial announcement that the network had stalled on Thursday at 12:04 am UTC at block 14,035,019, assuring that “all funds are safe.”

It resumed around nine hours later for several minutes before pausing again at block 14,035,045.

At the time of writing, the network appears to be up and running again following an upgrade of its validator nodes to version 1.5.8, according to a Celo block explorer.

On the protocol’s Discord channel, one of the network’s validators with the username “Dee” said they saw the latest outage as “part of the growing pains” of the network but that they remained confident in the fundamentals as it was the first network halt in over two years:

“Even Visa had some network outage over the past two years despite being a market leader in payments for over 60 years.”

The Celo protocol’s white paper claims that it enables users to send payments “as easy as sending a text message.” The network touts an average block time of five seconds, is Ethereum Virtual Machine compatible and supports smart contracts and decentralized applications.

Related: Celo Foundation proposes to deploy Uniswap v3 on its native blockchain

The Celo network is also the protocol behind three stablecoins — Celo Dollars (cUSD), Celo Euros (cEUR) and Celo Reals (cREAL), as well as its native token Celo (CELO).

Earlier this week, the Helium network suffered a four-hour outage due to validator outages from a software update, causing delayed transaction finality.

On June 1, the Solana network suffered yet another outage, causing block production to halt for four and a half hours. It was one of seven network outages over the last 12 months.