Polymarket Outage History: Notable Incidents & Lessons
Polymarket has been remarkably reliable, but its biggest incidents have come at the worst possible times.
Polymarket maintains 99.9%+ uptime in the aggregate, but the incidents that have happened — especially during the 2024 US election — illustrate the platform's structural weak points.
Election night 2024
On the evening of November 5, 2024, Polymarket experienced multiple degradations as US election results came in. Order book latency spiked, the front-end loaded slowly, and some users reported failed wallet connections. The platform stayed online but its largest day of volume was its most stressed.
RPC provider incidents
Several Polymarket slowdowns have been caused by Polygon RPC degradation upstream — Alchemy, Infura, or QuickNode having issues simultaneously affects every Polygon front-end. These incidents are often resolved by the RPC providers within minutes but can stretch to hours.
UMA resolution controversies
Several markets have been disputed at the UMA oracle stage — the Ukraine/Zelensky suit market in early 2025 is the most cited example. These aren't outages in the uptime sense, but they're failures of the platform's information layer.
Protecting yourself
If you're trading on a high-volume night, place orders early, use limit orders rather than market orders, keep some MATIC for gas, and have a wallet you can sign with off-platform. When the front-end fails, your positions are still safe on-chain.