Base, the Ethereum Layer-2 network backed by Coinbase, has restored overall network stability following a period of significant transaction delays and elevated transaction drops that impacted users at the end of January. The incident began on January 31, 2026, when the network experienced periods of increased congestion, resulting in submitted transactions being delayed or, in some cases, completely dropped.
According to the Base development team, blocks continued to be produced throughout the disruption, but users faced higher-than-usual latency for transaction confirmations. The root cause was traced to an infrastructure configuration change related to transaction propagation. This adjustment caused the network's block builder to repeatedly fetch transactions that could not be executed due to rapidly rising base fees, creating a feedback loop in the transaction pipeline during volatile fee conditions.
"On Jan 31, Base experienced elevated transaction drops and inclusion delays," the team stated, explaining that the propagation change led to inefficient reprocessing of transactions, exacerbating the issues during peak congestion. The problem was mitigated by rolling back the configuration change, which restored normal transaction processing. The team has validated that this fix successfully restored overall network stability, though it noted that intermittent congestion may still occasionally cause delays.
Looking forward, Base has announced plans to conduct a full root cause analysis (RCA) and publish a public postmortem in the coming days. To prevent a recurrence, the network is undertaking a series of infrastructure improvements expected to take approximately one month. These upgrades include optimizing the transaction pipeline by removing unnecessary peer-to-peer overhead and tuning mempool queue behavior to improve transaction inclusion under stress. Additionally, Base is improving its alerting systems and change monitoring processes to detect propagation issues earlier and respond more swiftly.
The incident underscores the operational challenges facing Layer-2 networks as they scale rapidly, particularly during periods of heightened demand and fee volatility. Base has encouraged users and developers to follow updates via its official status page for future network performance issues.
