This Tuesday, February 6, 2024, the Solana network experienced a major outage ! Shutting down completely for almost five hours before being restarted. This outage caused a temporary drop in the price of the SOL token, which is now skyrocketing. Let’s take a look at what happened and how Solana reacted to this incident.
The beginning of the breakdown
The outage began at approximately 09:53 UTC, when block progress suddenly stopped on Solana. Thus preventing any transaction from going through. At 10:22 UTC, Solana issued an advisory stating that engineers across the ecosystem were investigating this mainnet-beta network outage.
This triggered an immediate drop in the price of SOL, from around $96 to $93.36 in just a few minutes. In total, the token lost more than 4% of its value during this outage.
Causes identified
Although the Solana Foundation has not yet released an official report on the causes of this incident, several knowledgeable sources pointed to a mechanism called the Berkley Packet Filter. This mechanism allows you to deploy updates and run programs on Solana.
According to these sources, a recent change in this mechanism via a Solana Improvement Proposal (SIP) would have removed certain functionalities such as blocking metadata, which would have caused a malfunction and shutdown of the network.
A software update to relaunch Solana
After nearly two hours of trying to resolve the issue, the Solana Foundation announced that it was preparing a new version of the validation software, including a fix to resolve the issue that caused the network shutdown.
Validator operators have been asked to prepare for a network upgrade and reboot. At 2:57 p.m. UTC, block production finally resumed on Solana following the successful deployment of version 1.17.20 and the network restart by validator operators.
A return to normal… for now
Following this restart, normal operation of the Solana network was able to resume. The price of SOL rallied to around $95.90, recovering almost all of its losses. Engineers continue to closely monitor performance to ensure stability.
Although this incident has been resolved, it once again highlights the challenges faced by networks like Solana that focus on speed and throughput at the expense of decentralization. Centralized outages like this damage Solana’s reputation as a reliable and robust network.
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