Base post-mortem reveals sequencer bug behind back-to-back outages

A “race condition” after the system was reset prevented the sequencers from catching up, causing the second outage.

A sequencer bug was responsible for two outages of the Coinbase layer-2 network Base last week, according to a post-mortem.  

The Base engineering team said in a Saturday post-mortem that they identified a bug in sequencer block-building logic that allowed “stale journal state” to persist after a transaction validation failure. 

“An invalid transaction was received by the block builder and failed during execution, as expected, but erroneously did not clear the journal state that contained the accounts and storage slots that had been accessed,” said the team.

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