Coinbase-made Base briefly breaks, affecting apps like friend.tech

Base, the Ethereum-based layer-2 created by Coinbase, had serious issues with transaction sending yesterday, affecting popular applications like friend.tech.

Coinbase’s status page noted the outage at 15:07 PDT on Tuesday. “Send / receive is currently delayed,” the log read. “Teams are working on a fix ASAP.” The issue was resolved at 17:56 PDT.

The Base status page described the problem as a “stall in production of blocks.”

Friend.tech, a controversial BitClout-like platform that allows user to buy ‘shares’ in X users (formerly Twitter), is Base’s most popular application. During the downtime, it assured users on X that while trading wasn’t possible, funds were safe and that messaging and search were functioning “as normal.”

Base is experiencing a service interruption. All funds are safe but users are unable to submit txns. The Base team is investigating and providing updates at https://t.co/qWzKcYGiPc

Messaging and search are working as normal in our app. We’ll post a tweet when trading works again
— friend.tech (@friendtech) September 5, 2023

Base markets itself as “an easy way for decentralized apps to leverage Coinbase’s products and distribution” and promises that it has “plans to progressively decentralize in the years ahead.” Base is built using technology shared with Optimism, another Ethereum-based rollup.

This appears to be the first mainnet outage for Base, which launched in July.

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