• Polygon’s blockchain explorer, PolygonScan, went down on Wednesday, February 22nd causing a lot of confusion and speculation.
• Rumors spread that the entire Polyon blockchain had gone offline, leading to gloating comments from other crypto communities including Avalanche (AVAX) and Solana (SOL).
• The issue was caused by an unusually large block reorganization which caused some nodes to fail for a brief period of time.
PolygonScan Outage Causes Confusion
On Wednesday, February 22nd the blockchain explorer for Polygon (MATIC), PolygonScan, went down causing a lot of buzz and rumors on Crypto Twitter (CT). Speculation arose that the entire Polyon blockchain was offline. This led to gloating comments from other crypto communities such as Avalanche (AVAX) and Solana (SOL).
Cause Of Outage
The actual cause of the outage was due to an “unusually large” block reorganization which occurred two minutes before the nodes went out of sync. This caused some nodes to fail in validating blocks for a short period of time despite the network continuing to produce blocks.
Nailwal Clarification
Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal quickly clarified the situation via Twitter when he suggested users use OKLink instead while they worked on fixing the problem with PolygonScan. Austin Roberts of Open Relay noted most providers didn’t handle it “gracefully” with PolygonScan requiring more than two hours and Rivet being back up within one hour. Dapp developers were also affected as they struggled to get their services back online again.
Impact On Network Performance
Due to this incident, there was an impact on network performance but it did not last long as it was only a minor problem affecting the blockchain explorer itself rather than any major issues with the network itself. As Greg Lang from Rivet pointed out, more people were impacted by this than actually talking about it.
Conclusion
Overall, while this outage may have been inconvenient for some users and created confusion amongst others, it turned out to be a minor issue that could be resolved quickly and easily without any lasting damage done to the network or its performance capabilities.