The Ethereum L2 ecosystem has recently experienced another wave of instability. Starknet encountered a brief mainnet outage this Monday, and the official team later released a detailed root cause analysis. The technical details behind this failure are worth paying attention to.

From a technical perspective, the issue was between the execution layer (blockifier) and the proof layer. The two layers produced inconsistent state data, triggered specifically by certain cross-function call and rollback combination scenarios. When these two operations occurred together, the execution layer incorrectly recorded some state changes that should have been rolled back. As a result, transaction execution anomalies occurred, and these affected transactions did not receive finality confirmation on the L1 layer.

This led to a chain reorganization. Approximately 18 minutes of transaction records were completely rolled back. This number may seem small, but for applications and users relying on chain stability, it was enough to cause concern.

More notably, this is the second major outage for Starknet since 2025. Looking back historically, the failure in September last year was caused by a sequencing bug that directly led to the network being down for over 5 hours, with about 1 hour of on-chain activity rolled back. Frequent technical issues have dealt a significant blow to the confidence in the ecosystem of this L2 network.

For applications and user groups operating within the Starknet ecosystem, continuous instability events will naturally prompt them to reassess risks. Strengthening system stability now appears to be the most urgent task for the Starknet team.