The Solana Network Restarts After Outage
The Layer 1 network Solana has successfully restarted after being down for approximately five hours. According to a report by the network, block production on Solana mainnet beta resumed following an 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. The outage started at around 09:53 UTC and lasted for five hours. Core contributors are currently working on identifying the root cause of the issue.
Possible Cause of Failure
Matthew Sigel, Head of digital assets research at VanEck, speculates that the failure may be related to an alteration in the features of Solana’s “Berkley Packet Filter” mechanism, which is used to deploy upgrades and execute programs on the network. This alteration involved adding a blocker to prevent metadata from being used in the BPF.
Details of the Outage
Solana first reported the outage at 10:22 UTC, stating that engineers were investigating an issue on mainnet-beta. The disruption caused block progression to halt, resulting in transaction failures. After two hours of troubleshooting, Solana Status announced on social media that engineers were preparing a new validator software release with a patch to address the problem. This required validator operators to upgrade and restart the network. The last major outage experienced by Solana was in February 2023, but the network was successfully brought back online after two restart attempts.
Hot Take: Solana Bounces Back from Major Outage
The Solana network recently experienced a significant outage, causing block production to come to a halt for several hours. However, after diligent efforts by engineers and validator operators, the network has successfully restarted and resumed normal operations. This incident highlights the importance of continuous monitoring and prompt action in maintaining the stability and functionality of blockchain networks. While the root cause of the outage is still being investigated, it is encouraging to see that the Solana community was able to address the issue and restore network operations. This incident serves as a reminder of the ongoing challenges faced by blockchain networks and the need for robust infrastructure and protocols to ensure their reliability.
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