Base, Coinbase’s Ethereum layer-2 network, is back up and running after a consensus issue knocked it offline for nearly two hours on Thursday.
The team first noticed something was wrong around 4:03 PM UTC when block production started acting up. By 5:21 PM UTC, they’d tracked it down to a consensus problem that created an invalid block, which basically froze the whole chain. Block production resumed just before 6 PM UTC.
Base creator Jesse Pollack said on X that all funds are safe, but added that “a halt is not okay” and the team would use this incident to improve the platform. A full post-mortem is coming.
Here’s the thing — this kind of outage is actually rare for a major blockchain. Base is the most-used Ethereum layer-2 out there. Its last notable outage was back in August 2025, and that only lasted 33 minutes.
The timing was also a bit awkward. The outage happened just hours before Base’s scheduled “Beryl” upgrade, which went live at 6 PM UTC and wrapped up around 8 PM UTC. That upgrade was meant to cut withdrawal delays and introduce a new token standard for real-world assets and stablecoins.
So, a rough day for Base — but they got through it. Let’s see what the post-mortem reveals.
