Block production at Coinbases (Coin) Basic Network Stopped for 33 minutes early Tuesday after a Sequencer-Failover that did not recover as expected, developers said in a report after Mortem on Wednesday.
The stop began at 1 p.m. 06:07 UTC on August 5, when the active sequencer fell backwards due to overload from activity on the chain. While Base’s Conductor module – a core component of the OP stack designed to maintain uptime – tried correctly to switch leadership to a standby sequencer, the new body was not fully delivered and was unable to produce blocks.
A sequencer organizes transactions for location in blocks. The system correctly tried to hand over the responsibility to a backup sequencer, but that backup was not fully clear yet and could not produce blocks.
As it couldn’t automatically switch again, production stopped until engineers manually solved the problem. The network was fully recovered by 06:40, according to the report.
To avoid reorganization risks – that is, when a blockchain temporarily rewrites history by replacing confirmed blocks with alternative – the team held the paused conductor and coordinated a controlled leadership transition. This process contributed to the current.
As such, the power interruption highlighted an important operational risk in LAG-2-rollup networks that depend on centralized sequencers to order and submit transactions. These systems remain dependent on fast failover mechanisms and complete delivery, and a single point gap in this chain can lead to full network stalls.
The base said it will implement infrastructure changes to ensure that all sequencers who are added to the cluster are clear even before election, and will prioritize improved test coverage to validate this logic.
The incident follows earlier stops on other descendants and comes, just as Base has seen record traffic from new token launches and NFT-mint tied to on-chain social apps such as Farcaster and Zora.
Read more: Base Network suffers 1. Downtime since 2023, stops operation for 29 minutes
