Avalanche is back up after not producing blocks for roughly five hours.
According to Avalanche’s status website, the layer 1 blockchain has resumed finalizing blocks on its network as validator nodes have been upgrading to patch the bug that stalled them from reaching consensus.
The last block finalized on the blockchain network before the outage Friday morning occurred at 6:02 a.m. ET, data from the block explorer Avascan shows.
“Developers across the community are currently investigating a stall in block finalization that is preventing blocks from being accepted on the Primary Network,” stated Avalanche’s status website at 6:30 a.m. ET.
“The issue seems to be a gossip-related mempool management bug, which is purely a code-related bug, and not an issue with performance handling,” Ava Labs co-founder Kevin Sekniqi previously wrote on X at 7:58 a.m. ET.
At 10:23 a.m. ET, Sekniqi shared on X that a fix and rollout were being tested and to “Stay tuned for more updates.”
After initially saying that Avalanche’s block production issue seemed to be connected to a new inscription wave launched earlier today, Sekniqi clarified and said, “Inscriptions seem to have hit the edge case, but inscriptions did not affect performance.”
Avalanche’s halt comes several weeks after rival layer 1 blockchain Solana suffered a five-hour-long outage as a result of a bug that prevented Solana validators from reaching consensus. Avalanche’s blockchain production issue Friday also comes a few days after its unlocked supply of AVAX increased by 9.54 million tokens.
While AVAX initially dropped 1.6% following the outage, Avalanche’s native token has settled at $36.48, a slight drop from $36.81 at 6 a.m. EST when the last block was produced, data from CoinGecko shows.
Avalanche is a layer 1 blockchain network known for its smart contract functionality. Its token is the tenth largest cryptocurrency by market cap, which stands at nearly $13.76 billion, behind Solana and Ethereum.
UPDATE (Feb. 23 10:59 a.m. ET): Updated with Kevin Sekniqi’s latest tweet.
UPDATE (Feb. 23 1:17 p.m. ET): Changed the headline and first two paragraphs to reflect how Avalanche has resumed finalizing blocks after its five-hour-long outage
