The mainnet of Sui faced two interruptions in the span of just 48 hours due to a software issue with its v1.72 version, causing a problem in transactional activities and epoch transitions.
According to the Sui Network’s official status update on X, the disruptions were traced to a gas accounting issue introduced in the v1.72 upgrade involving the interaction between the new Address Balances feature and existing gas fee logic.
The failure affected validator consensus during epoch transitions, temporarily preventing transaction finality across the network.
Sui stalls twice after v1.72 upgrade
Sui first experienced a full mainnet stall on May 28, 2026, when a bug in the v1.72 release caused validators to stop processing user transactions.
According to Sui’s status page, the outage lasted 5 hours and 55 minutes before service was restored after a coordinated validator upgrade exceeded the threshold required for recovery.
The network resumed operations before stalling again on May 29 during an epoch transition process. Validators were unable to finalize a consistent network state, resulting in another interruption to transaction processing.
Later on, Sui admitted that the second outage was as a result of the same core problem of how Address Balances works together with the gas fee structure. The team mentioned that the first solution was only temporary and failed to solve the clash. The outages occurred as a result of changes introduced by the v1.72 update.
According to Sui, the new Address Balances feature unexpectedly interacted with existing gas accounting logic during epoch transitions, creating a consensus-level failure that prevented validators from agreeing on the next network state.
Although validators remained online and continued internal system activity, they were unable to finalize user transactions until emergency fixes were deployed.
During the first outage, the network remained stalled until more than two-thirds of staked validators upgraded their software and restored consensus.
SUI price falls as users face delayed transactions
Market data collected from large exchanges indicated that SUI was trading at around $0.91-$0.92 on May 29th, which translates to about a 7%-8% drop in price for the day.
Trading activity increased during the outage as users reacted to halted network operations and delayed transaction confirmations.
Though user balances stayed intact on the blockchain network, operations were interrupted, such as slow token transfers, paused DeFi transactions, and inability to transact NFTs and trade.
The incidents highlighted execution risks for traders and DeFi users who rely on timely transaction settlement.
Sui faces its second major disruption of 2026
The outages in May were the second time in the year Sui experienced a major network failure.
During January 2026, there was a different kind of issue with the consensus that caused an outage lasting about five to six hours due to validators failing to validate new checkpoints.
While the January and May incidents had different technical causes, both required coordinated validator intervention to restore normal operations.
Sui confirmed on May 30 that the network had returned to normal operations after validators applied an emergency fix.
According to the team, a full post-incident review will be published soon, outlining the interaction between the Address Balances feature and gas accounting during epoch transitions.
Now, developers are observing if there is a need to redesign the feature, if gas accounting needs more separation from the consensus process, and what other measures are required to avoid such epoch transition issues in the future.
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Source: https://www.cryptopolitan.com/sui-mainnet-suffers-two-outages-in-two-days/