This incident caused a state of chaos and confusion within the Arbitrum community, as the developers remained silent for an extended period of time.
Traders were the first to report the suspension of normal network operation, flooding the Arbitrum Discord community with messages expressing concern over potential financial losses once the network came back online.
Eventually, the development team reached out to the community, acknowledging the decrease in network performance and initiating efforts to identify the underlying cause of the failure. Users were assured that necessary fixes would be implemented as soon as they were ready.
Sequencers play a crucial role in determining the order of transactions within layer 2 networks like Arbitrum. They act as the vital link between L2 and the underlying Ethereum blockchain, functioning as a single point of failure.
It is worth noting that a previous failure of the Arbitrum sequencer was recorded in June due to a technical error that caused a backlog of unprocessed transactions.
In September, the Arbitrum administration informed the community that 69,448,385 unclaimed ARB tokens from the user contract had been transferred to the ArbitrumDAO treasury balance.