Polygon Suffers Extended Outages Following Heimdall Update

The Polygon (MATIC) proof-of-stake chain has been down for more than 12 hours following the network’s recent Heimdall update.

Polygon, an Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution, implemented the new upgrade yesterday. And according to a post on the network’s official forum, some downtime was expected.

However, technical issues have extended the downtime to over 12 hours and are now creating concern among users.

On March 10 at 05:50 UTC, the network started experiencing problems after issues were found with the Heimdall implementation. According to the post:

We suspect there may have been a bug in the upgrade which affected consensus, causing different Heimdall validators to be on different versions of the chain, thereby not reaching two-thirds consensus. When using Tendermint consensus, this situation will cause the Heimdall chain to halt.

The team assured users that their funds are safe and that the affected Heimdall node does not handle user transactions.

In a later update, the team said they would be applying a hotfix to get the chain to produce blocks again. Polyscan showed that the chain had started to create blocks again, and since the fix was applied, blocks are starting to catch up.

Polygon users vent frustrations

Polygon users understood there would be an outage, but after 12 hours took to Twitter to find out what was causing the issues. Users of the Layer 2 have been forced to delay announcements and giveaways due to the downtime.

And users have continued to report downtime on Polygon’s forum even after the hotfix was applied.

Polygon is built on three pillars, each with its own specific task. The chain’s smart contracts run on Ethereum (ETH), and the Bor layer supports the production of blocks. The newly-updated Heimdall layer is a set of POS nodes that help the network reach consensus, which cannot be achieved without this pillar.

Polygon has seen a significant increase in usage recently, with brands like Dolce & Gabbana bringing its non-fungible token collection to the chain.