According to a post-mortem report, the Base network, developed by Coinbase, experienced a 33-minute block production halt on August 5 due to a sequencer failover that did not recover as expected. The issue began when the active sequencer fell behind schedule due to congestion from on-chain activity at 06:07 UTC. Although the Conductor module, a core component of the OP Stack designed to maintain network uptime, attempted to shift leadership to a standby sequencer, the new instance was not fully provisioned and unable to produce blocks. As a result, the system stalled until manual intervention by engineers resolved the issue by 06:40 UTC.
The incident highlighted the importance of reliable failover mechanisms and complete provisioning in layer-2 rollup networks that rely on centralized sequencers to order and submit transactions. To prevent similar outages, Base plans to implement infrastructure changes, ensuring all sequencers are Conductor-ready and improving test coverage to validate this logic.