2 posts tagged with "network-health"

Correction, 2026-08-13: Ethereum did not lose finality on March 2. A non-GLOBAL join across distributed ClickHouse tables dropped canonical block matches and mislabelled ordinary slots as orphans. The corrected peak hourly orphan rate is 0.33%, minimum canonical participation is 99.10%, and every epoch in the window remained exactly two epochs behind finality. I retract the zero-participation, three-hour finality-loss, entity-wide-fork, and escalating-incident claims. The full correction reproduces the join bug and cross-checks raw checkpoints.

Something significant happened to Ethereum four days ago, and it's largely flown under the radar.

On March 2, 2026, between roughly 10:24 and 13:00 UTC, the mainnet experienced its most severe consensus disruption since the proof-of-stake transition. Block orphan rates hit 68%. Validator participation collapsed to zero in at least one epoch. The chain stopped finalizing — not for twenty minutes like the May 2023 incident, but for close to three hours.

This is the third network incident in twelve days.

Correction, 2026-08-13: The timing cliff in this post still reproduces, but the headline orphan total and both February "network split" sections were wrong. A non-GLOBAL join across distributed ClickHouse tables dropped canonical matches and mislabelled ordinary slots as orphans. Corrected peaks are 0.67% for both February windows, not 63% and 78%, and the corrected 30-day total is 390 unique orphan block roots, not 1,783. I retract the parallel-chain, self-healing-fork, entity-wide-incident, and 58%-of-month claims. The full correction reproduces the model bug and cross-checks finality.

Ethereum's block orphan rate should be nearly zero. It isn't — and the reasons why are more interesting than the number itself.

Over the last 30 days, 1,783 blocks were proposed on mainnet and then lost. Not missed (nobody tried), not reverted (execution failed) — proposed, gossiped, and then quietly discarded when another block won the fork choice. That's 59 blocks per day that disappeared into the void.

Most of them arrived on time.