Base Blockchain Recovers After Nearly Two-Hour Outage

Base, the blockchain backed by crypto exchange Coinbase, has returned online after the network suffered nearly a two-hour outage due to a consensus issue that halted block production.

Base posted to X on Thursday after the outage that the network’s blocks “are being produced normally, and we have verified widespread recovery in the ecosystem.”

Base’s status page said it was investigating “unhealthy” block production at 4:03 pm UTC on Thursday. At 5:21 pm UTC the team said it “isolated a consensus problem that caused an invalid block to be sequenced. This prevented new blocks from being created.”

Base said in an update just before 6 pm UTC that it had “recovered healthy blockbuilding” and that ecosystem-wide infrastructure was able to sync, adding it had identified the issue and would investigate the root cause and share a full post-mortem.

The outage was a rare instance of downtime for a major blockchain like Base, the most used Ethereum layer-2 network, which last experienced a major outage in August 2025 when it went down for 33 minutes, according to its status page.

Base creator Jesse Pollack posted to X that all funds on the network are safe, “but a halt is not okay and we’ll use this to continue to level up base as a platform for global, 24/7 finance.”

The downtime appeared to occur separately and just hours ahead of an upgrade for Base, dubbed Beryl, that was scheduled for 6 pm UTC and was completed two hours later at 8 pm UTC.

The update aimed to reduce delays on withdrawals and introduce a new token standard for real-world assets and stablecoins.

Layer-1 blockchain Sui experienced two periods of downtime on back-to-back days in May, each causing a temporary halt in block production. Sui later said the downtime was caused by a network update that it knew had a low probability of causing a halt.