A bug in popular clients caused a synchronization error for 13% of nodes in the Ethereum network. Restarting them could take months. This was reported by CoinDesk, citing a discussion thread on GitHub.
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The issue affected some users of the Parity-Ethereum and OpenEthereum clients versions 2.7 and above. Nodes running these clients stopped synchronizing with the network, resulting in outages.
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To address the problem, OpenEthereum developers proposed rolling back to version 2.5.13. The move was met with negative reception by the community, as re-synchronizing could take weeks and even months.
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“Am I understanding correctly that everyone who updated to 2.7.2 has been hit hard and must resynchronize, which for certain node configurations will take months?” said user cogmon.
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OpenEthereum developers plan to release a more stable client version in mid-September.
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Node operators also have another option — switch to another client. The largest of them is Geth, which is installed on 79% of nodes in the Ethereum network. Parity-Ethereum and OpenEthereum account for 11.2% and 7.5% respectively, according to EtherNodes.
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In that case, the Ethereum network would be exposed to additional risk. Clients with different codebases are needed to guard against hacker attacks. If one of them is taken offline, the others will continue to support the network.
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A shift by node operators to Geth would increase network centralisation. In 2016 the client faced a major DDoS attack. The optimal remedy for such a problem was to connect nodes to alternative software.
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