Starknet stopped working for four hours
The Ethereum Layer-2 network, Starknet, experienced a complete shutdown lasting over four hours on 5th January 2026. The outage began at approximately 09:53 UTC when the network started taking much longer than expected to create new blocks. By 10:42 UTC, developers identified inconsistencies in how transactions were being processed and verified on the network. The team posted in Starknet’s Telegram community that block production had been temporarily paused whilst they investigated a proving error. A proving error means the mathematical proof that transactions were valid became incorrect or couldn’t be generated properly. During the shutdown, users could not send transactions, use decentralised applications or move funds on the Starknet network. The network remained completely frozen whilst engineers worked to identify and fix the underlying technical problem.
Developers rolled back the network to fix the problem
At 13:23 UTC, Starknet developers released an emergency software fix to resolve the technical issue causing the outage. The team decided to revert the network to block height 5,187,263, which nullified several minutes of recent blockchain activity. Think of this like rewinding a video to an earlier point before something went wrong. Transactions submitted between 09:24 and 09:42 UTC may not have been processed correctly and were essentially erased. By 14:02 UTC, the network was fully operational again with block production and transaction processing working normally. Starknet confirmed on X that the network was back online and fully operational following the four-hour disruption.
The team announced they would publish a detailed retrospective report including a full timeline and root cause analysis. This report will explain exactly what went wrong and what measures will prevent similar problems in the future. Interestingly, the STRK token price remained relatively stable around $0.089 with minimal immediate volatility despite the shutdown. The network’s total value locked also stayed steady at over $797 million, indicating users did not panic and withdraw funds. This suggests investors are becoming more tolerant of temporary technical problems as new scaling technologies mature on live networks.
Second major outage raises reliability concerns for the network
This disruption marks the second major technical failure for Starknet in recent months, raising questions about network reliability. In September 2025, Starknet suffered a nine-hour outage during the Grinta upgrade that required reverting approximately 80 minutes of transactions. The recurring pattern highlights ongoing complexity in maintaining high-throughput execution environments in decentralised Layer-2 systems. Starknet uses zero-knowledge rollup technology, which batches many transactions together and proves they’re valid using advanced mathematics. This technology is newer and more experimental than other Layer-2 approaches, which may explain the reliability challenges.
According to L2beat data, Starknet is one of the most active Layer-2 networks by daily transaction throughput. Daily user operations per second increased by 24 percent over the week before the outage occurred. Despite strong growth metrics, the outage effectively paused all activity across decentralised applications, wallets and smart contracts temporarily. The event places renewed pressure on the Starknet Foundation to accelerate its Stage 2 decentralisation roadmap and improve infrastructure resilience. Starknet introduced Bitcoin staking to its offerings in September 2025, allowing users to stake Bitcoin whilst earning STRK token rewards. As the network grows and handles more users and value, maintaining uptime becomes increasingly critical for user confidence.
