Solana developers identify cause of major outage

Solana developers published a preliminary report on the causes of the major outage. The incident occurred on September 14 — new blocks did not come out for 17 hours.

9-14 Network Outage Initial Overview https://t.co/cHYtqSwf5v

— Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) September 20, 2021

According to the report, the network returned to full functionality in under 24 hours and no funds were lost. As the root cause of the outage, developers cited a

“At 12:00 UTC, Grape Protocol launched its IDO on Raydium, and bots generated transactions that flooded the network,” the developers clarified.

According to them, memory overflow led to the malfunction of many validators, slowdowns and, ultimately, a network halt. Shortly after the restart on September 15 the developers explained, that transactions overflowed the processing queue, and the lack of prioritization of critical messages caused network forking.

“At 12:11 UTC, the validator community noticed a spike in transactions and network slowdown […]. When the problem was diagnosed, the community proposed a hard fork from the last confirmed slot,” the statement says.

According to the developers, validators applied the update locally, checked the ledger, and continued producing blocks. The network returned to full functionality at 05:30 UTC, they added.

The developers thanked the validator communities, engineers and the Solana ecosystem. They said a detailed report would be published in the coming weeks.

In the wake of the outage, the SOL price fell from around $160 at one point to $142.39 (Kraken exchange). The token is currently trading around $143.

In his critique of Solana Ethereum supporters find themselves in the Bitcoin community’s position in its disputes with opponents of digital assets.

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