Coinbase's Base probes suspected invalid block behind two-hour outage

Coinbase’s layer-2 network Base experienced an outage lasting approximately two hours on Thursday after an invalid block caused a consensus failure that stopped all transactions on the chain in what seems to be its biggest outage in 90 days.

The network was affected starting at 16:03 UTC when Base’s status page indicated the mainnet’s block production as “unhealthy”. Minutes later, the Base team informed the public about the issue. “Base Mainnet is currently halted while the team works on an issue with block production,” the network said on X at about 12:20 p.m. ET. The network stated that “all funds are secure.”

Base traces outage to consensus issue

Base attributed the cause of the outage to a consensus failure that saw an invalid block get into the sequencing pipeline, preventing further block creation, according to the network’s status page updates. The Base team reported having pinpointed the cause of the outage 50 minutes after it initially reported the issue, at 16:52 UTC.

Two hours after the disruption, the Base network resumed operations. “We’ve verified widespread recovery in the ecosystem. If there are any remaining nodes that are still stuck, they will recover after restarting and syncing,” Base’s team reported on X.

Blocks are being produced normally, and we have verified widespread recovery in the ecosystem.

Any remaining stuck Base nodes will recover upon restart and syncing.

The team has found the root cause for this halt and we’ll share a full post mortem based on our learnings and…

— Base Build (@buildonbase) June 25, 2026

The team has found the root cause for this halt and we’ll share a full post-mortem based on our learnings and fixes as a top priority,” Base announced on X once operations had been restored.

Outage precedes Beryl upgrade

The Thursday disruption marked the first instance of a block production halt on Base mainnet in 90 days, as shown on the network’s status page. However, it was not an anomaly in the bigger picture. The network faced withdrawal problems lasting for about 30 hours in May, as well as another outage in August 2025. Earlier, Cryptopolitan reported that Base’s state update system was down and nobody even noticed it.

The outage further occurred hours before an intended upgrade as well. The Base network is going through the process of implementing the Beryl hardfork that brings in a new token standard for stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets, among others.

Base is one of Ethereum’s biggest L2 networks, and any stoppage of blocks will definitely be an extreme case in the context of the rollup architecture. In the event of a single-sequencer control of the blocks, it is very possible that a problem in the software or consensus will cause a stoppage of the whole blockchain network until the team takes action.

The Base team recommended that node operators in its ecosystem should restart the nodes to facilitate synchronization. However, Coinbase share price dropped by more than 5% over the last trading session. COIN traded around $142.52.

Don’t just read crypto news. Understand it. Subscribe to our newsletter. It's free.