SOL Plunges As Solana Suffers Yet Another Outage

The Solana Network suffered yet another outage after a misconfigured node took down the entire network on Saturday, leaving all pending transactions in limbo. 

Despite its burgeoning popularity, Solana has suffered a slew of outages, the latest being a string of outages that took place in January. 

The Latest In A Long Line Of Outages 

The Solana outage on Friday, which forced the network offline, was the fourth major outage suffered by the network since January. In January, users on Solana had to endure a string of partial outages, which kept cropping up at different intervals during the month. The latest outage also comes a year after the network faced a crippling 18-hour outage, bringing the network to a grinding halt. 

The Solana Status site, which the Solana Foundation operates, updated users on Twitter, stating that the network was experiencing “degraded performance” and that developers were working on identifying and fixing the issue. However, shortly after this update, Solana issued another update, stating that the network was experiencing a complete outage and not being able to process transactions. 

“The Solana network is experiencing an outage and not processing transactions. Developers across the ecosystem are working on diagnosing the issue and to restart the network. More information will be provided as it becomes available.”

According to the latest reports, the network is now back online after a nearly 6-hour long outage. 

Reason For The Outage? 

Solana validators tweeted about the incident, stating that a misconfigured node was behind the latest outage. 

“It appears a misconfigured node caused an unrecoverable partition in the network. A validator was running a duplicate validator instance. Meaning when it was their turn to produce a block, they produced one from each instance, for the same slot, so some validators saw the one block, some the others, then couldn’t agree which one was correct.”

Solana developer Laine informed users in a tweet that developers had initiated the restart, stating that they require 80% of the stake to complete the restart successfully. 

Solana Remains Tightlipped 

So far, Solana has not commented on the outage. However, Solana executives have discussed the network’s outages in the past, with founder Anatoly Yakovenko calling them the network’s curse. However, he also pointed out that the Bitcoin blockchain has had hours between blocks at different times in its history.

Solana has often been hyped by the community as the “Ethereum Killer” thanks to its high scalability and super fast speeds. It has become a popular blockchain for the minting of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and decentralized applications (dApps). After Ethereum’s successful transition to Proof-of-Stake, Solana has become the third-largest Proof-of-Stake blockchain behind Ethereum and Cardano. However, the network will need to address its outage issues if it is to compete with them. 

Solana Price Plummets 

The Solana price, which has anyway been on a downward trajectory, has fallen over 87% after reaching its all-time high in November. The news of the network’s latest outage drove the price down by a further 6%. At the time of writing, Solana is trading at $33. 

Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.