Odaily Planet Daily reports that on-chain analyst Vadim noted that Base experienced a consensus vulnerability today, resulting in a single invalid block. Block production halted entirely after block height 47806542, causing a network outage of nearly two hours. Due to Base’s single sequencer architecture, when this node failed, the entire network stopped operating, with no backup block producers or alternative validation nodes available to bypass the failure and maintain on-chain activity. During the outage, users were unable to perform transactions, liquidations, or withdrawals.
In addition, the network recovery process failed to complete automatically, requiring node operators in the ecosystem to manually restart their nodes before block synchronization gradually resumed. This is not the first time Base has encountered such an issue; in August last year, Base experienced a 33-minute network freeze due to a failure during sequencer switching. The single-sequencer model exposes the centralization risks present in some current Layer 2 networks: while offering higher speeds, the entire chain may halt entirely if a critical component fails due to a single point of failure.