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.