Polygon Labs has moved quickly to calm fears that its network went offline, following a confusing moment when Polygonscan, one of its main block explorers, stopped showing new data. For over an hour, users saw what appeared to be a complete halt in block production.
Polygon Labs clarified that the issue was caused by a display glitch during a backend update on Polygonscan, not a failure of the network itself. Blocks were being produced the entire time.
The incident caused speculation about a possible network-wide failure. Still, the situation was enough to spark anxiety and bring back the conversations about how much the blockchain world relies on third-party tools for visibility.
Source: @WuBlockchain (via X/Twitter)
Polygon glitch brings pressure on RPC providers
Concerns emerged earlier today when users noticed Polygonscan had stopped displaying new block data on the Polygon PoS chain . The explorer appeared to have frozen, giving the impression that the network had ceased producing blocks.
Polygon Labs clarified via Discord that the network itself remained active and functional. “Polygonscan is updating the data, the chain is not inactive. Some RPC providers need to update the patch,” the company said in a Discord post.
The glitch also brought attention to RPC providers, middleware entities that help users and applications interact with the blockchain. Polygon Labs noted that some RPC providers may also need to update their configurations to stay aligned with recent updates. These providers serve as the backbone for many decentralized applications (dApps), allowing them to fetch transaction data and broadcast interactions without running their own nodes.
The firm confirmed that while the core Polygon protocol was unaffected, some dApps relying exclusively on outdated or unpatched RPC infrastructure may have experienced delays in transaction queries or UI anomalies. This highlights a key risk in decentralized ecosystems, where multiple layers of service providers can independently introduce points of friction, even when the base chain operates smoothly.
Polygon has had similar outages in the past
This is not the first time that display anomalies have led to mistaken assumptions about a network halt. In February 2023, Polygonscan suffered a similar incident, again showing zero blocks for a period of time, while in reality the network remained operational. That episode prompted Polygon Labs to begin communicating more proactively about explorer performance versus blockchain health.
Polygon Labs urged users and developers not to treat Polygonscan, or any single block explorer, as a source of truth. Instead, the company pointed to alternative resources such as native validator dashboards, chain monitoring APIs, and its own network status page for real-time verification.
