Coinbase’s Base Layer-2 network halted block production for 33 minutes on Aug. 5, marking its first recorded outage since the roll-up went live. The disruption ended after engineers manually switched control to a healthy mainnet sequencer, allowing blocks to resume. A post-mortem released by Base developers attributes the stoppage to an automatic failover that handed operations to an unhealthy sequencer. The malfunction created an “unsafe head delay” during a surge in on-chain activity, preventing the system from processing new transactions. Base said the underlying bug has been patched and extra safeguards added to its high-availability cluster to reduce the likelihood of a repeat incident. The outage spotlighted the reliance of many Ethereum Layer-2 networks on centralized sequencers, a design choice that critics warn can pose a single point of failure as user adoption scales.