31.07.2025 02:17

Polygon, a prominent Ethereum scaling solution, experienced a significant network disruption on Wednesday, lasting over an hour. The outage stemmed from a "validator exit," a process where a validator node leaves the network, unexpectedly triggering a bug within Heimdall, Polygon's consensus layer. This unexpected event prevented the network from progressing its validation processes.


While the incident temporarily halted Heimdall's operations, Polygon's proof-of-stake chain, Bor, continued to function, producing blocks without interruption. The Polygon Foundation initially acknowledged the issue in a now-deleted X post, later replacing it with a more comprehensive explanation. However, even this revised statement failed to fully elucidate the root cause of the network malfunction.


The Polygon Foundation actively collaborated with network participants to restore affected user services following the disruption. Although their statement indicated ongoing efforts, full service restoration hadn't been achieved by 3 p.m. ET. A later update clarified that while the Polygon PoS chain remained operational, RPC issues hindered user access to various applications, stemming from a temporary Heimdall disruption approximately six hours prior.


This incident occurred shortly after Polygon completed a major upgrade, described by its founder and CEO as its most complex technical undertaking to date. This upgrade, implemented earlier in the month, involved significant changes to transaction block processing. At a market capitalization of $1.9 billion, Polygon's POL token (formerly MATIC) currently ranks as the 66th largest cryptocurrency, according to CoinGecko. The token experienced a minor 2% price decrease in the 24 hours following the network outage, trading around $0.21. Information sourced from internet resources.