Reliability Concerns After Polygon Hard Fork, What the Bug Caused?

Polygon has confirmed that an emergency hard fork was successfully completed on Wednesday to fix a software bug that interrupted the  transaction finality on its proof-of-stake (PoS) chain. After the upgrade, the team said milestones, checkpoints, and state sync are processing normally and network stability has been restored.

Source: Polygon Foundation

Polygon hard fork updates, Bor v2.2.11-beta2 and Heimdall v0.3.1, were launched at 3 p.m. UTC. The faulty milestones that had caused validator issues were deleted from node databases, allowing transactions to finalize properly once again.

What was the issue?

The bug appeared in Bor (block producer) and Heimdall (consensus system) stopped the creation of milestones (local fast confirmations). Even though blocks were still being made, some validators and services froze, and explorers like Polygonscan showed no new blocks for over five hours. This caused delays for users, and some exchanges paused the network's transactions.

Impact on Users and Market

During the downtime, several exchanges and services stopped Polygon-based transactions. TokenPocket, a multichain wallet, temporarily disabled Pol deposits and withdrawals. Traders on Polymarket also raised concerns about the risk of reversals during the outage.

The network’s native token POL fell about 3 to 4%, dropping to $0.27, before recovering slightly once the fix was confirmed.

Source: CoinMarketCap

ReliabilityQuestions Remain

The incident has raised questions about Polygon ’s stability, especially since it came just weeks after launch of Heimdall v2, which was meant to speed up confirmations in just five seconds. Despite upgrades, if we compare Polygon’s Total Value Locked (TVL) which was on peak in 2021 with $9.43 billion, has severely dropped to just $1.99 billion today (DeFiLlama).

Experts suggested that reliability issues may discourage adoption, particularly as users and developers look for stable scaling solutions.

Another L2 Faces Problems Too

Polygon wasn’t alone, Linea, another Ethereum Layer-2, also suffered an outage the same day. Its mainnet sequence stalled, pausing block production for approximately 1 hour (67 min) before a fix was deployed.

Both cases show Ethereum’s vulnerabilities in the growing networks, which are becoming increasingly important to improve in the crypto ecosystem but still face negligence.