Solana Blockchain Suffers 5-Hour Outage

The major outage triggered a drop in Solana’s SOL token.

Solana, the low-latency blockchain that’s seen an explosion in activity in recent months, experienced an approximately five-hour outage on Tuesday.

Solana’s SOL token slumped from around $96 before the problem began to below $94 as the incident was ongoing. It was recently down 2.5% from 24 hours earlier, worse than the 1% drop in the CoinDesk 20 Index, a benchmark for the largest cryptocurrencies.

Transactions resumed being processed around 15:00 UTC, blockchain data showed. They had stopped around 09:52 UTC, data showed.

The halt came nearly a year after the Solana network was down for almost two days in April 2023

“Solana Mainnet-Beta is experiencing a performance degradation, block progression is currently halted, core engineers & validators are actively investigating,” Laine, a Solana validator, said in an X post when the problem was still going on. Core engineers said they identified a fix and were building a new version for validators to upgrade, network validator @mtromp said in an X post.

In a follow-up post, Laine said that validators had begun generating snapshots using their local ledger state – or the most recent data before the outage – to prepare for a restart.

The new validator software release includes a patch to address an issue that caused the cluster to halt, said the Solana Foundation, which maintains the network. “Validator operators should prepare for an upgrade and restart of the network,” it added.

Validators are entities that utilize computing power to maintain a blockchain and process transactions. Snapshots refer to an exact copy of blockchain data at a certain point in time.

BY: Shaurya Malwa

DISCLOSURE

Please note that our privacy policy, terms of use, cookies, and do not sell my personal information has been updated.

The leader in news and information on cryptocurrency, digital assets and the future of money, CoinDesk is an award-winning media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. In November 2023, CoinDesk was acquired by Bullish group, owner of Bullish, a regulated, institutional digital assets exchange. Bullish group is majority owned by Block.one; both groups have interests in a variety of blockchain and digital asset businesses and significant holdings of digital assets, including bitcoin. CoinDesk operates as an independent subsidiary, and an editorial committee, chaired by a former editor-in-chief of The Wall Street Journal, is being formed to support journalistic integrity.