Base Discloses Causes of Two Recent Outages, Identified as Sequencer Vulnerabilities

Odaily reported that the Coinbase Layer 2 network Base experienced two block production outages last week, with the root cause identified as a vulnerability in the sequencer's block construction logic. This vulnerability allowed outdated log states to persist after transaction validation failed, preventing the sequencer and validator nodes from processing invalid blocks until sequencing was restored.

The first incident lasted 116 minutes, while the second, caused by a race condition following a system reset that prevented the sequencer from keeping up, lasted 20 minutes. The team has since fixed the issue by applying a patch to the sequencer, with future plans to improve protocol fuzz testing and build a graceful recovery mechanism. (Cointelegraph)