Starknet experiences its second major outage since Grinta's launch.

Starknet developers are investigating a major incident that brought the entire network down, disrupting Block production for several hours. This is Starknet's second major outage in just about four months.

In a brief announcement on X, the Starknet team confirmed the network was experiencing downtime and stated that they were actively working to identify the cause and restore the system as quickly as possible.

Previously, on September 2nd, Starknet also experienced a major outage due to the ambitious Grinta upgrade. According to post-inspection reports, the incident stemmed from a chain of consecutive problems: Ethereum nodes malfunctioned, causing three new sequencers to become misaligned; subsequent manual intervention created further inconsistencies; and a bug in the blockifier software exacerbated the situation, forcing the network to perform two chain reorganizations.

At the time, StarkWare collaborator Abdelhamid Bakhta frankly acknowledged the seriousness of the situation, stating that this was the unavoidable price of technological innovation. He also compared Starknet to Solana – which had experienced numerous network failures in its early stages of development.

Starknet isn't the only Ethereum Layer 2 network experiencing downtime. In the past, Base was down for 33 minutes due to a sequencer error, Linea stopped Block production for about an hour, Polygon zkEVM was interrupted in March 2024, and Arbitrum also experienced a 90-minute downtime due to a surge in transactions.

Nevertheless, in 2025, Starknet still implemented several major technical upgrades, such as state data compression in March, achieving decentralized “Stage 1” in May, and the Grinta upgrade in September with a decentralized sequencer, pre-confirmation in under 1 second, and a new fee mechanism. By November, the integration of the S-two prover was expected to boost performance by up to 100 times.

The Starknet ecosystem also expands through integrations with LayerZero, Hyperlane, Circle 's CCTP for native USDC , and partnerships with Blockstream, Privy, and the Xverse Bitcoin wallet.

Starknet, developed by StarkWare, officially launched in 2021. The project was co-founded by Eli Ben-Sasson, who previously co-founded the Zcash security protocol. The native Token, STRK, is used to pay transaction fees, for Staking in a dual consensus model with Bitcoin, and for network governance.