Solana network restarts after major outage

The Solana validator community successfully completed the restart of the Mainnet Beta. No new blocks had been produced for more than sixteen hours.

“Dapps, block explorers, and supporting systems will recover over the next several hours, at which point full functionality should be restored,” wrote the developers.

The Solana validator community successfully completed a restart of Mainnet Beta after an upgrade to 1.6.25. Dapps, block explorers, and supporting systems will recover over the next several hours, at which point full functionality should be restored.

— Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) September 15, 2021

The restart occurred after updating the node software to version 1.6.25.

On September 14, around 16:00 (MSK), the Solana blockchain stopped producing blocks. Founder Anatoly Yakovenko said that resources were exhausted as a result of a spam-transaction attack.

“The Solana network faced a sharp increase in transaction load, peaking at 400,000 TPS. These transactions overwhelmed the processing queue, and the lack of prioritization of network-critical messages led to the network starting to fork,” the developers explained.

According to them, this led to excessive memory consumption, causing some nodes to go offline.

1/ Solana Mainnet Beta encountered a large increase in transaction load which peaked at 400,000 TPS. These transactions flooded the transaction processing queue, and lack of prioritization of network-critical messaging caused the network to start forking.

— Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) September 14, 2021

The Block analyst Larry Cermak suggested on the eve that Solana validators faced RAM shortages, particularly those with 128 GB or less.

The issue seems to be connected to validators running out of RAM. Especially those running 128GB

— Larry Cermak (@lawmaster) September 14, 2021

Following the outage, the SOL token price fell from around $160 at one point to $142.39 (Kraken exchange). However, as the situation developed, the coin’s price recovered to previous levels.

In March 2021, a multi-hour outage in block production occurred on the Stellar network.