Base Ethereum Withdrawals Stall 36 Hours After Azul Upgrade Bug
Base's Ethereum mainnet state updates stalled for approximately 36 hours starting 29 May 2026, after the TEE enclave in the newly deployed Azul upgrade failed to generate settlement proposals. Block production and user transactions continued normally throughout the outage, and no funds were lost.
A TEE enclave failure halted Base's Ethereum state updates for 36 hours starting 29 May
Base's official status page reported a TEE enclave failure at 15:55 UTC on 29 May 2026. The failure halted the proposal system responsible for posting Base's state commitments to Ethereum mainnet. Base marked the incident resolved at 03:38 UTC on 31 May — a window of approximately 36 hours.
Block production continued normally as the settlement pipeline to Ethereum went offline
During the outage, block production on Base continued without interruption. Users could send transactions and interact with decentralized applications throughout the 36-hour window. The stall went undetected by most users because Base withdrawals already carry a mandatory seven-day challenge period. A settlement delay of that length does not trigger user-facing alerts within that window.
"It's kind of crazy that Base state updates have been down for over 30 hours now because of some bug related to the recent upgrade and no one even noticed just because withdrawals take seven days anyway.", ~30 May 2026. — donnoh.eth, developer (X post, quoted in Cryptopolitan)
Azul's new proving system, activated two days earlier, contained the failed component
Developers traced the failure to the Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) enclave — the component that generates cryptographic attestations proving correct execution of Layer 2 batches. When the TEE system stops producing proofs, the proposal pipeline stalls and no new state commitments reach Ethereum mainnet.
Azul, Base's first independent upgrade, introduced this TEE enclave on 28 May at 18:00 UTC — approximately 22 hours before the failure. The upgrade added a dual TEE and zero-knowledge (ZK) proof system designed to shorten the withdrawal challenge window from seven days to a target of six hours. It also replaced Base's upstream execution client with base-reth-node, Base's own internally maintained binary.
Base resolved the incident on 31 May with no funds lost and a post-mortem pending
Base confirmed no user funds were lost or exposed during the outage. The development team is scheduled to publish a post-mortem report analyzing the TEE failure and the recovery process. The incident is the first production failure for Base's new independent proving architecture since it separated from the Optimism Superchain stack.
Primary source: Base official status page — Mainnet Withdrawal Delay, 29–31 May 2026
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