An outage occurred on the Starknet mainnet, an Ethereum-based ZK rollup network, Cointelegraph reported on Jan. 5 local time.
Engineers are carrying out emergency recovery work, but the cause has not yet been identified. The downtime has lasted more than 2 hours. Cointelegraph said the incident has again put the spotlight on questions about Starknet’s reliability after several outages last year.
Starknet uses a ZK rollup model that processes transactions off-chain and posts only cryptographic proofs to Ethereum. It aims to provide high throughput and low fees for smart contracts, decentralised finance (DeFi) and gaming applications.
But after a major upgrade in September 2025, block production stopped and chain reorganisations occurred. Serious problems emerged, including the loss of about 1 hour worth of transactions.
At the time, Starknet said it had analysed the issue as starting with an error at an Ethereum RPC provider and a sequencer bug, and it pledged architecture improvements and expanded monitoring. Cointelegraph said the renewed downtime is raising questions again about stability.
Chi-gyu Hwang
delight@d-today.co.kr