Avalanche’s C-Chain stopped producing blocks at around 6:30 am ET Friday, the cause of which is currently under investigation.
Most transactions on the network take place on the C-Chain, however some subnets are reportedly unaffected.
In an X post, Ava Labs co-founder Kevin Sekniqi attributed the likely cause to “a gossip-related mempool management bug, which is purely a code-related bug, and not an issue with performance handling,” meaning the outage was not related to a spike in usage of the network.
The current working theory is that it is an “edge case” related to inscriptions.
According to Avalanche’s network status page, “Developers across the community are currently investigating.”
Avalanche validator operators have been in the process of upgrading their node software to a new version that would bring a major upgrade called Durango online.
The upgrade is expected to activate on March 6, 2024, and as of now, roughly 17% of the 1,838 network validators are already running the new client production code version 1.11.0, according to data provider snowpeer.io.
That release of AvalancheGo was published on Wednesday, but it is not thought to be the cause, according to Sekniqi.
“I do not think it is related to v1.11, it just seems to have hit an edge case in mempool processing,” Sekniqi told Blockworks. “The bug hit [a] majority of nodes, it seems.”
A fix is currently undergoing testing, he said.
The outage bears resemblance to one that knocked Solana offline earlier this month.
Read more: Solana price dips as outage requires a network restart
In that instance, a software patch followed by a coordinated restart was required before service was restored several hours later.
According to community manager Leandro Matos on the Avalanche Discord, the outage is unusual. “The chain only had one minor outage since 2020 which lasted a few minutes,” he said.
This is a developing story, and will be updated.
Updated Feb. 23, 2024 at 8:38 and 9:24 am ET with additional context.
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Source: https://blockworks.co/news/avalanche-blockchain-downtime