Starknet Mainnet Halted Again: Fresh Outage Freezes Ethereum L2 for Over 2 Hours

Starknet, an Ethereum layer-2 system that is based on zero-knowledge rollups, experienced another mainnet outage on Monday that halted network operations for over two hours and once again questioned the stability of Starknet as an operational system as it enters 2026.

Starknet developers reported the outage on X as a post, saying engineers were investigating the issue.

No immediate explanation was given for the cause of the outage. At the time of the initial update, block production had stalled for just over two hours, leaving users unable to submit or finalize transactions.

Despite Strong Metrics, Starknet Halt Stops All On-Chain Activity

On-chain data from Starknet’s block explorer showed the network had processed more than 264 million transactions since launch and supported over 56,000 active accounts, with average transaction fees sitting below one cent.

Total value locked stood at roughly $840 million. Despite these metrics, the halt effectively paused all activity across decentralized applications, wallets, and smart contracts during the downtime.

The explorer later indicated that block production had resumed, with new blocks appearing minutes after the incident was acknowledged publicly.

Starknet is designed to batch transactions off-chain and submit cryptographic proofs to Ethereum, allowing it to scale decentralized finance, gaming, and other smart contract use cases while relying on Ethereum for settlement and security.

The network has also positioned itself as a bridge for Bitcoin-related decentralized finance, promoting what it calls a BTCFi expansion within the Ethereum ecosystem.

The latest outage interrupted these ambitions, at least temporarily, as developers and users waited for normal operations to resume.

The disruption follows a difficult year for the network. In September 2025, Starknet experienced a far more severe incident after deploying a major upgrade known as Grinta, version 0.14.0.

That update, intended to advance decentralization by introducing multiple sequencers, triggered an extended halt in block production that lasted approximately nine hours.

During that episode, the network required two chain reorganizations, rolling back around an hour of activity and forcing users to resubmit transactions.

Starknet Outage Adds to Growing Pattern of Network Interruptions

A post-mortem published after the September outage traced the failure to a combination of factors.

Different sequencers were operating with inconsistent views of Ethereum due to issues with RPC providers, which disrupted block proposals.

A separate software bug in the component responsible for updating Starknet’s state compounded the problem when handling reverted transactions, ultimately leading the team to manually halt the chain to preserve correctness.

In April 2024, Starknet suffered a four-hour outage after a rounding error triggered block reorganizations, filling transaction capacity before developers cleared the backlog and restored normal network operations.

While the latest halt appears shorter and less severe than the September incident, it adds to a pattern of interruptions during Starknet’s transition toward a more decentralized architecture.

Such halts typically result in delayed or failed transactions, temporary inaccessibility of funds and services, and downtime for applications built on the network.

In previous incidents, some centralized exchanges temporarily suspended STRK deposits and withdrawals as a precaution, although trading often continued internally.

Market reaction to the latest outage was muted. STRK was trading around $0.089, up about 1.3% over the past 24 hours, with daily trading volume rising more than 38% to roughly $63.7 million.

The token remains sharply below its early-2024 peak above $4, reflecting broader market conditions and lingering concerns around supply and network reliability rather than a single event.