Polygon zkEVM down due to issues with blockchain sequencer

The crypto community has been pondering on social media about the ongoing downtime, while Polygon assures its users that it is actively working to resolve the issue.

Ethereum scaling protocol Polygon has announced that its zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) is currently experiencing downtime due to an issue with its blockchain sequencer.

In a post on X, Polygon reassured its two million followers that the issue is confined to the zkEVM specifically and does not impact any other chain 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 clarified that the problem comes from the blockchain sequencer, which is responsible for organizing and combining transactions into batches before relaying them to the Polygon zkEVM smart contract on Ethereum’s main network.

The blockchain platform emphasized it is working on fully resolving the issue and has promised to release a comprehensive “post-mortem” statement once the matter is resolved.

Several X users were speculating over why the crypto community has remained silent regarding the unexpected prolonged network downtime.

A user on X, 0xngmi asked 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.”

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This comes only a month after the Solana network experienced a significant outage.

On Feb. 6, Cointelegraph reported that block production on the Solana network halted for over five hours before validators restarted the network. Since January 2022, Solana has seen around half a dozen significant outages.

In March 2023, Polygon launched the zkEVM to its mainnet beta in an effort to allow developers to deploy smart contracts with increased finality and lower costs.

After it was released, Cointelegraph reported that it mimics the transaction execution environment of Ethereum’s mainnet.

Polygon claimed that the open-source zkEVM allows decentralized applications (DApps) to scale through transaction batching, unlocking higher performance.