Cosmos Hub resumed block production days ago, but Ledger Wallet users still cannot see balances or send transactions
Cosmos Hub is back online after a network stall that began on September 8, but for a significant group of ATOM holders the outage never really ended. Ledger’s status page continued to list Cosmos as a major outage on September 13, more than four days after the incident began, leaving users of the hardware wallet maker’s app unable to view ATOM balances, check transaction history, or submit transactions through Ledger Wallet.
The company opened the incident at 19:41 CEST on September 8. Its latest update, posted at 16:12 CEST on September 10, said restoration work was continuing and that the affected features remained unavailable. Ledger has not disclosed a cause and has not provided an estimated restoration time, leaving users to piece together the situation from infrastructure providers’ status pages.
Two layers of the same outage
The continuing warning does not mean the Cosmos blockchain itself is still halted. QuickNode, a major blockchain infrastructure provider, reported that Cosmos Mainnet stalled at block 32,878,318 at 18:12 UTC on September 8 and that its own nodes had returned to the chain tip by 14:26 UTC on September 9. QuickNode marked its incident fully resolved at 00:24 UTC on September 12.
By September 12, the Cosmos Hub RPC endpoint was reporting block heights above 32.9 million, tens of thousands of blocks beyond the height in QuickNode’s initial alert, with the node confirmed as not catching up. In other words, the chain has been producing blocks normally for days.
What has not recovered is Ledger Wallet’s own service path for retrieving account data and broadcasting ATOM transactions. Those two layers can fail independently: a wallet interface can remain unavailable long after network nodes have caught up, which is exactly what ATOM holders are experiencing. Ledger has not said which component of its service path is responsible for the delay.
Workarounds exist, with one critical caveat
For users who need to move ATOM urgently, Ledger’s incident notice points to an alternative-methods guide that lists Cosmostation and Keplr as compatible third-party interfaces that can connect directly to a Ledger hardware device. Ledger’s Keplr instructions tell users to open the Cosmos app on their device and choose Keplr’s hardware-wallet connection option, which routes transactions through another interface while keeping the Ledger device itself in the signing flow.
The safety distinction matters enormously, and Ledger has been explicit about it. Connecting a hardware wallet to a third-party interface is not the same as importing the device’s recovery phrase into a software wallet. Ledger’s security guidance states that users should never enter the recovery phrase into a computer or smartphone and should never share it with anyone, including with Ledger itself. Phishing campaigns routinely exploit exactly these moments of confusion, when frustrated users go searching for shortcuts around a service outage.
Users who do not need to transact urgently can simply monitor Ledger’s status page and wait. Because the incident remains open and its status could change without notice, Ledger recommends refreshing the status page before attempting any workaround.
A quiet stretch for Cosmos
The wallet outage lands during an otherwise notable period for the Cosmos ecosystem. The network’s hub token ATOM has traded roughly flat through the incident, down about 0.8 percent over 24 hours and up just over 2 percent on the week, sitting near rank 66 by market capitalization with a market cap of roughly 854 million US dollars and 24-hour volume near 21.5 million US dollars, according to data aggregated by CryptoSlate.
The relatively muted price reaction suggests the market has treated the event as an infrastructure hiccup rather than a protocol-level crisis, consistent with the fact that the chain itself resumed production within roughly a day. Cosmos Hub has weathered stalls before, and the consensus mechanism’s ability to recover without a hard fork has generally been viewed as a resilience point.
Still, the episode highlights a structural reality of the modern wallet landscape. Self-custody hardware devices are marketed as the endpoint of trust, but the software that reads balances and broadcasts transactions often depends on centralized backend services operated by the wallet vendor. When those services degrade, users holding their own keys can still find themselves functionally unable to access their funds, not because the blockchain is down, but because the window into it is.
What to watch
The immediate signal to watch is Ledger’s status page, where the next update will indicate whether the account-data path is close to restoration. The longer the outage persists, the greater the reputational cost for Ledger, which has spent the years since its 2020 data breach rebuilding trust around operational security and transparency.
For the broader industry, the incident is a useful case study in outage communication: infrastructure providers like QuickNode resolved and documented their incidents within days, while the consumer-facing wallet layer has gone more than 96 hours without a disclosed cause or timeline. As blockchains mature and outages become rarer, the quality of the recovery experience, not the stall itself, may be what users remember.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice.
five days of major outage on the ledger status page and not one word on the cause. quicknode resolved and documented in under four days, ledger just went quiet
quicknode documented their whole incident in four days, ledger still cannot name the failing component after five. the asymmetry says everything
quicknode shipped a full postmortem with timestamps, ledger gave us a red banner. if this drags past a week i expect class action noise in france again
atom barely moved through all this, down less than 1 percent. market clearly reads it as a ledger problem, not a cosmos problem
my status page finally flipped to monitoring a few hours ago, maybe progress? still zero word on root cause which is the actual scandal here
monitoring after 5 days lol, that banner change means they stopped typing not that anything got fixed. root cause still a state secret
moved to keplr via the hardware connect within an hour of the app dying, took ten minutes. meanwhile ledger’s status page has said major outage for 4 days with no cause and no ETA
^ same experience. chain itself has been at tip since sept 9 per quicknode, so this is purely ledger’s backend. you hold the keys but the window into your funds is still their server
Exactly, chain at tip since sept 9. Your keys your coins, except the window into them runs on someone elses status page.
Connected through Keplr in ten minutes with the hardware wallet option. The device signs, Keplr only broadcasts. Never type your seed phrase anywhere, phishing crews love outages like this.
second the keplr hardware route, did it sept 9 and balances showed fine. and yeah ignore any dm claiming to be ledger support, they swarm outages like this
kinda wild ATOM barely moved, down like 0.8% while holders literally cant send. market decided its a ledger problem not a cosmos problem
96 hours, no disclosed cause, no timeline. After the 2020 data breach you would think incident communication would be the one thing they nailed by now.
the 2020 leak playbook all over again, communicate nothing until forced. days of major outage and they still havent named the failing component, that part worries me more than the halt itself
five days of major outage and no named component. at some point this stops being an engineering problem and starts being a disclosure problem