TL;DR:
- Base, Coinbase’s blockchain, suffered a nearly two-hour outage on Thursday due to a consensus issue that halted block production.
- The team isolated an invalid block that prevented new blocks from being generated; the network recovered before 6 pm UTC and confirmed a widespread restoration.
- Hours after the incident, the network completed the Beryl upgrade, which reduces withdrawal delays and introduces a new token standard for real-world assets.
Base, the layer-2 blockchain developed by exchange Coinbase, was offline for nearly two hours on Thursday, June 26, following a consensus issue that brought block production to a complete halt. The network was restored before 6 pm UTC and the team confirmed widespread recovery across the ecosystem.
According to the official status page, the failure began at 4:03 pm UTC, when block production was flagged as “unhealthy“. At 5:21 pm UTC, the team reported that it had isolated a consensus issue that caused an invalid block to be sequenced, which prevented new blocks from being created.
Blocks are being produced normally, and we have verified widespread recovery in the ecosystem.
Any remaining stuck Base nodes will recover upon restart and syncing.
The team has found the root cause for this halt and we’ll share a full post mortem based on our learnings and…
— Base Build (@buildonbase) June 25, 2026
Base Will Publish a Post-Mortem
Minutes before 6 pm UTC, Base announced that it had restored healthy block production and that the ecosystem’s infrastructure was able to resynchronize. The team announced it would investigate the root cause and publish a full post-mortem.
Jesse Pollack, creator of Base, clarified that all user funds are safe, while acknowledging that an outage of this kind “is not acceptable” and that the incident would be used to continue improving the platform as infrastructure for real-time global finance.
The Incident and the Beryl Upgrade
This incident represented an exceptional instance of downtime for the network, which holds the title of the most used layer-2 network on Ethereum. Its last significant outage had occurred in August 2025, when it was down for 33 minutes, according to its own status page.
The outage occurred independently and just hours before Base executed the upgrade known as Beryl, originally scheduled for 6 pm UTC on the same day. The upgrade was completed two hours later, at 8 pm UTC. Its objectives include reducing withdrawal wait times and incorporating a new token standard aimed at real-world assets and stablecoins.
This episode is similar to the issues that affected the layer-1 blockchain Sui in May, when it experienced two periods of inactivity on consecutive days, both caused by a network upgrade that the team itself acknowledged carried a low probability of triggering a halt in block production.
