The Solana Network Resumes Operations After Major Outage
The Solana Network is back online following a major outage that resulted in the network being unable to process transactions and advance blocks.
The outage came almost a year after Solana’s last major network outage, which occurred on the 25th of February, 2023.
Solana Resumes Transactions After Outage
The outage was reported on Tuesday and lasted for approximately five hours, with network validators being unable to process transactions and advance blocks, according to Solana’s system incident reports.
“Engineers from across the ecosystem are investigating an outage on mainnet-beta.”
While the exact reason behind the outage remains unclear, developers noticed a rapid deterioration in the Solana Network’s ability to confirm new blocks and settle transfers on Tuesday morning UTC. According to several status dashboards, Solana abruptly halted transactions on the 6th of February, 2024, and marks Solana’s most significant outage since a two-day outage back in February 2023. A Solana validator confirmed the outage on X, stating,
“Solana Mainnet-Beta is experiencing a performance degradation; block progression is currently halted, and core engineers & validators are actively investigating.”
Successful Restart
Solana’s core engineers said they had identified a fix and were building a new version for validators to upgrade to, with a follow-up post stating that validators had begun generating snapshots using their ledger state as they prepared for a restart. Block production on Solana resumed following the upgrade to v1.17.20 and the restart of the cluster by validators. Snapshots are an exact copy of blockchain data up to a certain point.
“Block production on Solana mainnet beta resumed at 14:57 UTC, following a successful upgrade to v1.17.20 and a restart of the cluster by validator operators. Engineers will continue to monitor performance as network operations are restored.”
Outage Report
Following the restoration of the network, all eyes were on Solana devs hoping for an answer as to the reasons behind the cause of the outage. According to an update from Solana’s incident report, core developers are working on a root cause report, which will be made available to the community once it is complete.
“The outage began at approximately 09:53 UTC, lasting 5 hours. Core contributors are working on a root cause report, which will be made available once complete.”
Price Reaction
After the outage, Solana’s price dropped by almost 4%, going from $103 to $93 in hours. However, the price has since recovered, going back above the $100 mark, before dropping back into the 90s. Currently, SOL is trading at around $96.
