Base Network Suffers 1st Downtime Since Debut, Halts Operations for 29 Minutes

Base, Coinbase’s (COIN) Ethereum layer-2 scaling product, ground to a halt for the first time since its 2023 debut, disabling critical functions including block production, deposits, withdrawals and flashblock operations for 29 minutes before service resumed.

The incident occurred at 06:15 UTC as a result of an “unsafe head delay," according to Base’s incident status page. That is a technical fault disrupting the network's ability to confirm and produce blocks.

The team responded at 6:43 UTC that it was investigating the stoppage, and just a minute later reported the issue had been identified and resolved, with monitoring put in place to ensure no further complications emerged.

Though brief, the outage is significant given Base's prior record of uninterrupted uptime and its growing role in the Ethereum layer-2 ecosystem. Since its introduction, Base has accrued $4.2 billion in total value locked (TVL). A substantial portion of this, some $1.5 billion, is tied to the Morpho lending protocol, according to data from DeFiLlama.