Starknet outage raises questions about network stability.

• Starknet faces another disruption in 2026.
• ZK-rollup network is down for hours.
• Token STRK remains stable despite the outage.

Starknet's mainnet, Ethereum's second-layer solution based on ZK-rollups, suffered another outage this week, reigniting concerns about its stability. According to a post from the team, the platform's engineers are "actively investigating the issue and working to restore full functionality as quickly as possible," without, however, disclosing the cause of the outage.

At the time of publication, the outage had already lasted more than two hours, affecting users and developers who rely on Starknet for fast and inexpensive transactions. The platform aggregates off-chain Ethereum transactions and publishes summary proofs, allowing for greater scalability for smart contracts, DeFi, and gaming applications.

Starknet is currently experiencing downtime. Our team is actively investigating the issue and working to restore full functionality as quickly as possible. Thank you for your patience.

— Starknet (BTCFi arc) 🥷 (@Starknet) January 5, 2026

Despite the outage, the STRK token maintained its price virtually unchanged. The market seems to have reacted cautiously, but without panic, perhaps because it has experienced similar episodes before.

In 2025, Starknet experienced several significant outages. One of the most notable occurred in September, during the implementation of the Grinta update (v0.14.0), when block production was interrupted and the network had to revert about an hour of activity, forcing users to resubmit transactions.

Another significant incident that same year involved a failure in the sequencer, the component responsible for organizing and publishing transactions. Independent investigations detected several instances where block creation was slow or completely stalled, directly impacting user experience.

In its incident report regarding the Grinta outage, Starknet stated that the downtime lasted approximately nine hours. The document attributed the problems to a number of factors, including failures in Ethereum RPC providers and bugs in the sequencer. At the time, the team promised structural changes and improvements in network monitoring.

Starknet also seeks to position itself as a relevant infrastructure for the BTCFi ecosystem — integrating Bitcoin functionalities into the Ethereum network. However, recurring failures could compromise this ambition if the developers' trust continues to be questioned.