Polygon Block Explorer Crashes, Befuddles Users

full version at decrypt.co

Uncertainty, doubt, and no small amount of fear spread across the crypto community on Wednesday, as news spread of an apparent hours-long outage on the Polygon network.

The reports were greatly exaggerated, however: Polygon has not experienced any outages in processing blocks, Decrypt confirmed with multiple validators on the network. A few nodes on network did, though, go out of sync, according to a Polygon spokesperson—a far less severe issue.

“Block production never stopped, however there could have been a degradation in network performance temporarily,” the spokesperson said. “Those nodes have resynced and systems are back to normal.”

The broader panic appears to have stemmed, instead, from a still-ongoing outage at Polygonscan, an independent chain explorer that monitors and analyzes activity on Polygon. Polygonscan has not updated new Polygon blocks or transactions for almost two hours at writing.

Polygonscan did not respond immediately to Decrypt’s request for comment, though a Polygon spokesperson confirmed the issue was related to Polygon's temporary lapse in node syncing.

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In the brief window when it appeared as if Polygon itself had crashed, Crypto Twitter urgently spread news of the alleged outage.

Why is no one talking about the fact that polygon’s last block was 2 hours ago? #Polygon #avax #Ethereum pic.twitter.com/8yKw22whfY

— ayman.avax🔺 (@avaxayman) February 22, 2023

am I reading this wrong or was the last polygon block 45 minutes ago? pic.twitter.com/uXHA8SeYHs

— mad mert | helius.xyz (@0xMert_) February 22, 2023

Many—particularly advocates of rival network Solana—jumped on the story as evidence of systemic issues with Polygon’s functionality and long-term prospects.

The fact that Polygon is literally down right now is an absolutely UNDENIABLE TRUTH 🙏

There is a literal exodus of devs to Solana (check dev growth rates)

oops! 😉 https://t.co/ogqwQsWMXN

— macbrennan ◼️ (@macbrennan) February 22, 2023

Others attempted to tie the rumors to yesterday's announcement that Polygon would slash its staff by 20% amid current market conditions.

🚨 JUST IN: #Polygon Blockchain (#MATIC ) Down !
According to Polygonscan, Polygon blockchain's last block and transaction was processed at around 8:35 pm UTC on Feb. 22, approx 2 hours 10 min ago.

First Layoffs and now this!#Crypto #CryptoNews #altcoin #btc #Bitcoin #Binance pic.twitter.com/CRQz2tGlrn

— TheCryptera (@theCryptera) February 22, 2023

Polygon leadership then attempted to quash the panic by clarifying that the major issue was related to Polygonscan, not the Polygon network.

“It seems Polygonscan is having some issues,” Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal tweeted, before directing users to OKLink, another Polygon block explorer that showed the network to have experienced no issues with functionality in the period in question.

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Polygon users relished in the revelation, hitting back at Solana—which itself has experienced numerous outages in the last year—once it was made clear that Polygon was in the clear.