Starknet Mainnet Halts; Sequencer Failure Freezes Network for 2+ Hours
Starknet mainnet suffers another major outage on Jan 5, 2026, halting transactions for over two hours as sequencer struggles persist.
Starknet, a $450 million Ethereum Layer-2, has ceased block production. The network’s mainnet went dark around 09:53 UTC on January 5, 2026, trapping user funds and halting dApp activity in yet another blow to the protocol’s uptime record.
The outage, confirmed by the Starknet Status page, was triggered by a “slow block creation” alert that rapidly escalated into a full stop. As of 13:23 UTC, the incident remains unresolved, though engineers have identified a discrepancy between block execution and proving logic. The team is currently attempting to revert the chain to block 5,187,263 and deploy a patched blockifier version.
Sequencer Struggles Persist
This is not an isolated incident. Starknet’s architecture has repeatedly stumbled under operational stress. Today’s blackout mirrors the September 2025 outage, where the network went offline for nine hours following the “Grinta” upgrade. That event forced a chain reorganization, a drastic measure that wipes unconfirmed transactions from the ledger.
The team still investigate the reason for discrepency between the execution of the block to the proving logic. Concrete transaction and differences have been detected and we are debugging for the reasons. Starknet Status Update (10:42 UTC)
For a network pitching itself as the future of decentralized scaling, reliance on a centralized sequencer remains a single point of failure. While the roadmap promises decentralized sequencing, the reality in 2026 is that a single technical glitch can still paralyze the entire ecosystem.
Market Reaction
Despite the operational paralysis, the STRK token has shown surprising indifference. STRK is trading flat at approximately $0.09, refusing to capitulate despite the network inaccessibility. This muteness in price action suggests market fatigue, or perhaps that low expectations for uptime are already priced in. Volume, however, has evaporated as on-chain arbitrage and trading are technically impossible until the sequencer restarts.
