Ethereum competitor Solana suffers another network outage

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The popular Solana blockchain has suffered a handful of outages and transaction halts this year, including several partial outages.

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Solana offline again

A misconfigured node caused the Solana network to stop processing transactions and went offline on Friday. This marks the fourth major outage for the popular blockchain since January There were several partial outages for most of the month, data from Solana shows.

Notice

This outage comes a year after an almost 18-hour outage last September. Meanwhile, SOL, the #9 by market cap, is down 81% in the crypto winter of 2022.

At 7:01 pm EST on Friday evening, the Solana Status page, operated by the Solana Foundation, reported that the network was experiencing “degraded performance” – and that Solana developers were working to diagnose the issue. Shortly after, Solana announced that the network is “suffering an outage and transactions are not processed.”

The Solana network is down and not processing transactions. Developers across the ecosystem are working to diagnose the issue and get the network back up and running. More information will be provided as it becomes available.
— Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) October 1, 2022

What caused the break?

The Solana validator behind it stakewiz.com tweeted about the incident:

msgstr “It appears that a misconfigured node has caused an unrecoverable partition on the network.”

Accordingly, a validator was running a double validator case. That is, when it was his turn to produce a block, he produced one from each case – for the same slot, so some validators saw one block, others the others. As a result, it was impossible to agree on which was right.

According to Stakewiz, the Solana codebase should have addressed the issue. But due to an unknown reason, it caused an unrecoverable partition or fork.

The assumption now is that the misconfiguration was an accident, “probably a failed node setup”. The developers restarted the Solana mainnet on the last confirmed slot – 153139220.

The restart is now complete. Solana was out of service for 2 hours and 45 minutes.

What does Solana say about the failures?

Solana Labs did not immediately respond to requests for comment on this outage.

While Solana executives have historically battled crypto media reporting various breach totals, founder Anatoly Yakovenko told Real Vision earlier this month that breaches are “our curse.” He pointed out that in the history of the Bitcoin blockchain, there were times between two blocks.

Solana, one of the many smart contract blockchains considered the “Ethereum killer,” is a popular blockchain for beating non-mixable tokens, NFTs, and decentralized applications. After Ethereum switched to proof-of-stake on September 15, Solana is now the third largest proof-of-stake blockchain by market cap behind Ethereum and Cardano.

But: If Solana is to continue to grow and compete with Ethereum, the network needs to get its failures under control.

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Last updated on October 1, 2022