Validators on the Solana blockchain tried to restart the network twice over the weekend to restore service to users.
Nearly all on-chain activity on Solana was frozen shortly after midnight on Saturday, according to a report from CoinDesk. Users on Solana’s Discord server reported that the blockchain started unexpectedly “forking,” creating multiple conflicting versions of the chain’s history.
At around 2:00 am ET, Solana was processing only 93 transactions per second (TPS), which was significantly lower than its usual speed of 5000 TPS. Validators began to downgrade to a previous version of the network, suspecting the issue was caused by a bug introduced in a new version of Solana’s code that went live a few hours earlier.
Solana validators eventually concluded that the best way forward was to coordinate a synchronized chain restart, even if that meant hours of downtime.
The first restart attempt was abandoned because validators picked the wrong starting point, according to a follow-up report from CoinDesk, citing the network’s developers. After a second restart attempt, Solana came back online at around 8:30 pm ET on Saturday.
Approximately 15 minutes ago the Solana community successfully resumed the cluster – engineers will continue to monitor network performance as network operators are restored.
— Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) February 26, 2023
“Engineers from across the ecosystem continue to investigate the root cause of yesterday’s outage – a report will be made available once the case has been determined,” tweeted Solana on Sunday. The Solana Foundation w update this document once new information is available.
In total, the network was down for 19 hours and 20 minutes and drew sharp criticism from industry proponents. Still, Solana’s native token SOL was in the green after the blockchain’s recovery, trading around $23 at press time, up 3.20% in the last day.
