TON Blockchain Down Amid Six-Hours Outage

• The Open Network (TON) Blockchain experienced an outage, with no transactions being processed for over six hours.
• The disruption is attributed to an abnormal load on the network, resulting in a consensus loss.

Update: The network is again producing blocks, Tonscan data shows. 

According to on-chain data, the Open Network (TON) experienced an outage after no transaction had been processed for six hours.

Tonscan data showed that the Telegram-linked blockchain stopped producing new blocks at around 10:11 p.m. UTC on Tuesday. As the cessation grew, Binance and Bybit exchange temporarily suspended deposits and withdrawals to and from the network.

“TON Blockchain is currently experiencing a disruption in block production,” TON said in an X post. 

TON Blockchain is currently experiencing a disruption in block production.
The issue is occurring due to the abnormal load currently on TON. Several validators are unable to clean the database of old transactions, which has led to losing the consensus.

TON Core has issued a call…

— TON 💎 (@ton_blockchain) August 28, 2024

“The issue is occurring due to the abnormal load currently on TON. Several validators are unable to clean the database of old transactions, which has led to losing the consensus.”

The TON Status group on Telegram reported that validators had to restart nodes at about the same time with specific flags to return the network to its normal state.

“So far, not enough validators have restarted their nodes with correct flags. If you haven’t restarted your nodes with new flags yet, please do so ASAP,” it said.

X user @maverickqe, who claims to be the strategic advisor to the TON Society, said earlier that the DOGS memecoin airdrop has sparked a surge in transactions, overloading the network. “Garbage collection overloaded many of [the] validators for enough time for them to lose consensus,” the X user wrote. 

The Telegram-based memecoin DOGS garnered significant attention within the crypto community as its developers outlined plans to expand the token’s utility within the Telegram ecosystem. 

DOGS launched its airdrop event on Monday, where it said 81.5% of the fixed supply of 550 billion tokens would go to community members. Last week, DOGS said six million verified users requested the airdrop.

6 million verified users have requested a direct deposit of their $DOGS to exchanges and Telegram Wallet—nothing like this has been seen before in crypto! 😎

We decided to add more withdrawal options and extended the claim period:

– Claim to exchanges & Telegram Wallet: until…

— Dogs Community 🦴 (@realDogsHouse) August 18, 2024

The situation unfolded after Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov’s arrest by French authorities last week, which sparked a massive backlash from Telegram and TON communities. 

On Tuesday, a Telegram mini-app started a letter advocating for French authorities to release Durov. The letter has since gained nearly 1.7 million signatures. 

Meanwhile, the network’s native token, Toncoin, fell 2.14% in the past 24 hours to trade at $5.27, according to The Block’s Toncoin price page.