Polygon Restores Network Functions After Software Bug Disruption

According to Cointelegraph, the Polygon Foundation announced the restoration of consensus and finality functions on its layer-2 scaling network within the Ethereum ecosystem. This follows a software bug that caused some nodes to fall out of sync with the blockchain. The issue was addressed through a successful hard fork, which resolved disruptions in remote procedure call (RPC) nodes responsible for relaying information between applications and the blockchain layer. The bug originated from a faulty proposal by a validator, leading to some Bor nodes, which handle transaction ordering and block production, diverging onto separate network forks. Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal explained that fixes were implemented on both Heimdall v0.3.1 and Bor 2.2.11 beta2, effectively purging the problematic milestone from the database. With these updates, nodes are no longer stuck, and checkpoints and milestones are finalizing as expected. Software bugs continue to pose challenges for blockchain networks, especially as cryptographic protocols grow more complex with smart contract functionality, file storage, and cross-chain interoperability. These complexities can increase the frequency of bugs, potentially disrupting the onchain user experience. Despite the recent bug, transactions on Polyscan, Polygon's block explorer, are displaying correctly. This incident marks the second software bug Polygon has faced since July. The previous issue involved the Hemidall mainnet, the consensus client for Polygon's proof-of-stake (PoS) mechanism, which was halted for an hour. Similar to the recent event, block production was not interrupted, and new blocks continued to be added via the Bor mainnet. The partial outage in the consensus layer was attributed to a validator exiting the network, necessitating several RPC nodes to resynchronize with the blockchain to restore normal operations on the layer-2 network.