Solana, a blockchain known for its low-latency and recent surge in activity, encountered a significant outage lasting approximately five hours on Tuesday. The incident led to a temporary decline in Solana’s SOL token, which dropped from around $96 to below $94 during the outage. However, the token has since recovered most of the losses.
Blockchain data revealed that transaction processing resumed at approximately 15:00 UTC, after coming to a halt around 09:52 UTC. This interruption occurred almost a year after the Solana network experienced a prolonged outage of nearly two days in April 2023.
During the outage, a Solana validator named Laine reported on an X post that Solana Mainnet-Beta was facing performance degradation, resulting in a block progression halt. Core engineers and validators were actively investigating the issue, and a fix had been identified, with a new version being built for validators to upgrade.
In a subsequent update, Laine mentioned that validators had started generating snapshots using their local ledger state to prepare for a restart, capturing the most recent data before the outage.
The Solana Foundation, responsible for maintaining the network, announced that the new validator software release included a patch to address the issue causing the cluster to halt. Validator operators were urged to prepare for a network upgrade and restart.
Validators, essential entities that utilize computing power to maintain a blockchain and process transactions, were informed on Solana’s Discord channel that failure to upgrade to the latest software could result in the loss of delegation status. This would mean node operators would stop receiving rewards, potentially impacting network security as nodes become less distributed. Solana participants were thus encouraged to stay updated and implement the necessary upgrades to ensure the resilience and security of the blockchain network.
