Polygon Network Faces Temporary Disruption After Validator Exit, Impacting Heimdall Consensus Progress

Key Points

1. The disruption was caused by a validator exit bug that temporarily halted Heimdall, the network’s validation layer.

2. The Polygon Foundation acknowledged the issue and worked to restore services, but full normalization was not achieved immediately.

3. The incident impacted decentralized finance (DeFi) applications on Polygon, which secures around $1.2 billion in assets.

4. This event follows past outages, including a 10-hour zkEVM network outage and an 11-hour downtime in March 2022 due to a node issue.

5. Validator exits on Polygon can delay consensus finalization, unlike Ethereum, where such exits do not halt consensus.