On June 3, the Zcash founder, Josh Swihart, shared an official statement over the recent outage on the network that sparked panic within the community after many block explorers displayed that the network had stopped creating new blocks for around 4 hours.
Zcash was never down.
Many block explorers have been using unpatched nodes. Happens with every network update.
Fight the FUD. https://t.co/dsCHPHMlhw
— Josh Swihart 🛡 (@jswihart) JUNE 3, 2026
According to Zcash Open Development Lab’s latest post on X, the outage occurred due to a block explorer problem.
Zcash Founder Shares Major Statement on Outage
In the post on X, Josh Swihart also claimed that Zcash has never faced an outage; instead, there were many block explorers using unpatched nodes. This was the main reason that they stopped showing production of new blocks.
In the recent statement, Josh Swihart stated that, “A coordinated Zcash network upgrade was activated at block 336400. Many block explorers had not yet updated their nodes at the time of the upgrade, resulting in a loss of visibility into the chain’s state.”
The outage on the network was witnessed after a planned upgrade that took place at block 336,400 on June 3. The purpose of this upgrade was to fix a major security issue that was found in the Orchard shielded pool, which is the network’s major privacy technology. This issue came into the light during the recent security checks.
On June 1, Zcash announced a coordinated soft fork to temporarily stop certain transactions linked to Orchard in order to ensure the security of users. After this, the hard fork took place at 336,400, which fixed the problem and resumed normal operations.
The official blog post stated that, “This was the second security-driven protocol upgrade in Zcash history since its launch in 2016. The issue was discovered, confirmed, remediated, and resolved over the course of a few days, reflecting both the depth of Zcash developers’ protocol expertise and the strength of Zcash’s established disclosure processes.”
It added, “There is no evidence that the vulnerability was exploited. Zcash’s turnstile mechanism, which provides visibility into how much value can legitimately enter and leave shielded pools, protects the integrity of the 21M supply cap.”
In the last few months, amid the rise in privacy-related issues, Zcash has become a popular privacy-based cryptocurrency. This project was launched in 2016, and it uses zero-knowledge proofs, like zk-SNARKs. These kinds of advanced technologies are allowing users to keep their transactions private without revealing important details.
There are shielded addresses on the blockchain network, where users can hide details like sender, receiver, and the amount, while still proving that the transaction on the network is valid.
Amid the major regulatory developments in the digital asset sector, many users are raising questions about privacy in the digital asset sector. Zcash has given them an alternative option with shielded transactions with advanced crypto wallets like Zodl.
At the time of writing, ZEC is hovering at around $611.16 with a 44% gain in the last 30 days, according to CoinMarketCap. It is holding an impressive market capitalization of around $10.02 billion with a daily trading volume of $1.24 billion.
Zcash Faces Outage After Sui’s 3 Outages
Zcash has faced an outage a week after three major outages on the Sui network. Between May 28 and May 30, the Sui network experienced 3 different outages due to bugs in the software upgrade v1.72. These outages on the network have paused transaction processing for many hours, along with the block production. These kinds of issues are raising questions about the blockchain’s stability.
However, the issue with Zcash is very different from what happened on Sui, as it did not happen due to bugs on the network. Instead, the outage was caused by outdated blockchain explorers and nodes that failed to update after an emergency network upgrade.
