Solana has released an update to restart the network after it was down for several hours. A sudden surge in transaction volume because of an Initial DEX Offering (IDO) had caused the outage.
Network Outage
On Sept. 14 at 12:38 pm UTC, Solana’s Twitter account for updates, Solana Status announced that Solana’s mainnet beta had been “experiencing intermittent instability. This began approximately 45 minutes ago, and engineers are investigating the issue.”
Six hours later, it explained that a large increase in transaction load which peaked at 400,000 per second had saturated the network to create a Denial-of-Service and caused the network to fork. Due to the excessive memory consumption induced by the forking, some nodes even went offline.
“It’s good for people to understand that Solana mainnet is still clearly in beta,” CoinDesk reported a source developing one of Solana’s popular DeFi protocols interrupted by the outage. “I have faith in the Solana core contributors and validators to resolve this issue promptly.”
Reason for the Outage
Anatoly Yakovenko, the founder of Solana, explained to a user on Twitter the reason for the surge was trading bots during the Raydium IDO flooding the network at 300k transactions per second.
“The queues that forward txs (transactions) to block producers grew in size to a point that caused excessive forking. The fix to prioritize messages in this queue was already in the works but wasn’t out yet,” reads another tweet.
New Solana Upgrade to Restart the network
Yakovenko had appealed to the Solana validators to join its discord community to deliberate on the possible solutions. The discussion culminated in electing to coordinate a restart of the network and prepare a new update to release.
Today, the network released its upgrade v1.6.25 which has changed the “Fix active-stake u64 overflow in validator wait_for_supermajority logic,” as mentioned on Github.
The shared Google Doc has instructions for the upgrade one of which reads that the “Highest optimistically confirmed slot should read: 96542804.”
Solana had dropped over 10% in value since the outage occurred. But, it began resurging after the network update was released.
Be First to Comment