From 5:50 p.m. UTC on March 10th to around 4 a.m. UTC on March 11th, the Polygon Network was down. All users’ cash is safe, and the team detailed the specific flaws that caused the network to be unavailable for 11 hours.
The Reason behind the Polygon Problem
Polygon developers gave a prior warning to the users about a possible network outage due to a scheduled network update yesterday.
One of the two tiers of the network’s proof-of-stake chain uses the Heimdall implementation. At 5:50 p.m. UTC on March 10th, the organization’s internal team acknowledged the outage and provided additional details. It’s crucial to highlight that the outage caused no damage to user funds.
While we’re still looking into the root of the problem, it appears to have started with an earlier version that included a small parameterization patch for the Ethereum to Polygon PoS state sync/bridging module.
The company also acknowledged that the upgrade “may have had a problem,” which affected the consensus and resulted in separate Heimdall validators being on different blockchain versions. They were unable to get a 2/3 agreement as a result of this.
This condition will bring the Heimdall chain to a standstill if the Tenderming consensus is used.
Heimdall does not handle user transactions, according to the creators, although it is utilized for validator-related bridging and transactions.
Moreover, the team explained that Bor chain, the user-facing PoS chain of Polygon, was also halted because it relies on Heimdall for “block proposer committee selection.”
Temporary Hotfix for Polygon
The team successfully released a hotfix on March 11th at around 4 a.m. UTC, restoring operations on the Polygons network, though the Bridge itself “will not be active until we fully resolve the issue.” We appreciate your patience during this time and have an update: we have deployed a temporary hotfix to unblock the Bor chain and resume block production on the Polygon chain. While this remedy is only temporary, the team is working on a longer-term solution to the Heimdall problem.
The network’s bridge, on the other hand, will not be operational until the final solution is available.
