Solana Status revealed that the network was not processing transactions, adding that “developers across the ecosystem are working on diagnosing the issue and restart the network.”
The Solana network is experiencing an outage and not processing transactions. Developers across the ecosystem are working on diagnosing the issue and to restart the network. More information will be provided as it becomes available. — Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) October 1, 2022
This marks the eighth time that the network has gone down since its launch.
What led to the outage
A Solana validator stated that the recent downtime was caused by a misconfigured node that caused an unrecoverable network partition.
A Twitter thread from the same validator explained that the downtime appeared to have been caused by a validator that propagated an invalid block.
At the same time most operators weren't seeing new roots and it soon transpired that the network was in fact stuck. Quickly it was identified that a validator appeared to have propagated an invalid block. Not an issue in itself and something the network should handle. — Laine stakewiz.com (@laine_sa_) October 1, 2022
According to the thread, the offending validator was running a duplicate instance, and both produced a block. The block production led to a fork that created an “obscure code path where validators were unable to switch back to the heaviest (main) fork.” Simply put, Solana validators were stuck on the wrong fork.
The problem was mitigated after 80% of Solana validators restarted the network.
Validator operators successfully completed a cluster restart of Mainnet Beta at 7 AM UTC. Network operators an dapps will continue to restore client services over the next several hours. — Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) October 1, 2022
Community lambasts Solana
The crypto community has lambasted Solana for recording another outage this year.
Members of the community compared Solana’s frailty to other networks, implying that SOL’s downtime has become a monthly affair.
Sqlana has been down for hours. $SOL also went down on April 1, May 1, June 1 and July 1 It is October 1 in much of the world. pic.twitter.com/MjvxBni8ZJ — Evan Van Ness
License.
