On Solana, on-chain activity stalls after a technical outage

A technical fault hit the Solana mainnet-beta; blockchain explorers show blocks have not been produced for more than two hours.

Around 16:40 (MSK), the Solana Foundation confirmed the issues on Twitter:

“The Solana mainnet-beta is intermittently unstable. This began about 45 minutes ago, and engineers are investigating the issue.”

Solana mainnet-beta is experiencing intermittent instability. This began approximately 45 minutes ago, and engineers are investigating the issue.

— Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) September 14, 2021

Around the same time, Solana founder Anatoly Yakovenko wrote on Twitter:

“Hey, @solana validators! jump into https://t.co/q4DvhuuFeh its beta time”

hey @solana validators! jump into https://t.co/q4DvhuuFeh its beta time

— Anatoly Yakovenko (@aeyakovenko) September 14, 2021

The outage was confirmed by the Solana-based wallet service Phantom:

“The network appears to be experiencing intermittent instability. Phantom and other apps cannot connect.”

In the latest blocks, a significant share of transactions remained unconfirmed.

Developers said resource exhaustion was caused by a flood of spam transactions. They added that validators are preparing for a possible restart.

According to The Block analyst Larry Cermak, the overload was driven by a surge of users due to an upcoming IDO IDO scheduled for 21:00 MSK.

The reason I see floating around is that there was a highly anticipated IDO scheduled at 12pm UTC and too much demand caused an outage. Not sure about the technical details though

— Larry Cermak (@lawmaster) September 14, 2021

“Looks like a similar resource exhaustion as to a week ago. Which is a forwarder queue flood. 2/3 of those fixes were just tagged in 1.6.23 release. Just needed a few days to soak them before release 😭”

— Anatoly Yakovenko (@aeyakovenko) September 14, 2021

Earlier, in March 2021, a multi-hour outage occurred in the Stellar network.