The Starknet network, a prominent Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution, experienced a significant mainnet disruption on January 5, 2026, halting transactions and dApp operations for more than two hours. The Starknet team confirmed the downtime via an X post, stating engineers were "actively investigating the issue and working to restore full functionality as quickly as possible." The root cause was not immediately disclosed.
This incident echoes a series of reliability challenges for the network in 2025. Most notably, a major upgrade dubbed "Grinta" (v0.14.0) on September 2, 2025, led to a roughly nine-hour mainnet disruption. That event involved Ethereum RPC provider failures and bugs affecting sequencer behavior, resulting in halted block production and two chain reorganizations that reverted approximately an hour of activity, forcing users to resubmit affected transactions.
Starknet is a zero-knowledge (ZK) rollup-based Layer 2 that batches transactions off-chain and posts cryptographic proofs to Ethereum, aiming to provide higher throughput and lower fees for smart contracts, DeFi, and gaming applications. Despite the network being down, the price of its native token, STRK, reportedly held steady at the time of the reports.
