Arbitrum Operations “Back to Normal” After Inscriptions Surge Caused Outage

Arbitrum (ARB), a layer-2 blockchain on Ethereum, announced on Friday that its systems were back to full functionality following a temporary outage caused by a surge in Bitcoin Ordinals-inspired inscriptions. The incident prompted a sequencer to halt, resulting in an hour and a half of disrupted service.

According to Hildobby, a data researcher at venture capital firm Dragonfly, approximately 90% of transactions were inscriptions before the chain came to a stop. They highlighted that inscriptions had been steadily increasing in the hours leading up to the halt, with a particular inscription named "fair" triggering the disruption.

Arbitrum provided a status update on Friday afternoon, stating that gas prices on the network had stabilized and that all operations had returned to normal. The team is actively gathering more information about the incident and plans to share a comprehensive post-mortem analysis in the coming days.

Similar situations involving Ordinals-like tokens have been observed on other blockchains. Polygon encountered increased volumes and gas fees last month as a result of similar transactions.

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