Etherscan, a critical piece of infrastructure for the Ethereum network, experienced an outage lasting over 12 hours, initially reported as down for 5 hours. Users reported the site being down, marking it as the longest outage some could recall. The unscheduled maintenance left many seeking alternative explorers for on-chain Ethereum data. The situation highlighted Etherscan's importance in contract verification and overall network operations. Meanwhile, alternatives like Bitquery.io's Ethereum Explorer were suggested for obtaining real-time on-chain Ethereum data.