Starknet Suffers Fresh Mainnet Downtime as 2026 Begins

Source: DefiPlanet Original Title: Starknet Suffers Fresh Mainnet Downtime as 2026 Begins Original Link:

Quick Breakdown

• Starknet suffered a multi-hour mainnet outage at the start of 2026, with the team still investigating the cause.
• The disruption follows several reliability issues in 2025, including a major nine-hour outage tied to the Grinta upgrade.
• STRK token prices remained stable, suggesting limited immediate market reaction.

Overview

Starknet, an Ethereum layer-2 network powered by zero-knowledge (ZK) rollups, experienced a fresh bout of mainnet downtime as the project entered 2026, raising renewed questions around network reliability.

In an official statement, the Starknet team confirmed that the network was down and said engineers were “actively investigating the issue and working to restore full functionality as quickly as possible.” No immediate cause was disclosed. At the time of reporting, the disruption had lasted for more than two hours.

Despite the outage, STRK, Starknet’s native token, showed little price reaction.

Technical Background

Starknet is designed to scale Ethereum by batching transactions off-chain and submitting cryptographic proofs on-chain, allowing faster execution and lower fees while inheriting Ethereum’s security.

The platform supports decentralized finance (DeFi), gaming, and smart contract applications, and has recently expanded its vision to include Bitcoin DeFi (BTCFi), positioning itself as infrastructure for Bitcoin-related financial activity within the Ethereum ecosystem.

The latest downtime temporarily halted regular network activity, though no further technical details had been shared at the time of writing.

Not Starknet’s First Mainnet Outage

The incident follows a series of network disruptions in 2025 that placed Starknet’s operational stability under closer scrutiny.

In September 2025, a major upgrade known as Grinta (v0.14.0), triggered an extended outage that halted block production entirely. The disruption required two chain reorganizations, reverting roughly an hour of transactions and forcing users to resubmit activity.

Earlier in the year, Starknet also experienced multi-hour outages linked to sequencer issues, with external trackers recording several instances of delayed or stalled block creation.

Lessons from the 2025 Grinta Incident

In a post-mortem report, Starknet said the September outage lasted around nine hours and stemmed from a combination of Ethereum RPC provider failures and bugs affecting sequencer behaviour.

Following that event, the team pledged to implement architectural improvements and expand network monitoring to prevent similar disruptions in the future.

A Starknet representative confirmed that engineers are currently working to resolve the latest incident.