Solana Goes Down (Again)

Solana, one of the top Ethereum competitors, has suffered seven hours of downtime after its mainnet bet fell out of consensus, according to Austin Federa, head of communications at Solana Labs.

The global validator community has already managed to bring the network back online, successfully completing a cluster restart at 3:00 a.m. UTC.

The “Ethereum killer” suffered the outage due to an “enormous” number of inbound transactions clogging up the network. The network struggled to process a record-breaking 100 gigabits of data per second, according to a Twitter post.

Candy Machine, an app designed to mint non-fungible tokens, was the main culprit behind the lengthy downtime. Some users criticized Solana for censoring the NFT minting bots that made the network go dark. However, Federa clarified that the foundation didn’t issue such instructions, and very few validators actually adopted such instructions.

Not a rare occurrence

Solana emerged as one of the top Ethereum competitors in 2021 due to its high throughput and very low fees.

However, the blockchain has been plagued by technical hiccups. In January, the fledgling network suffered as many as six outages, attracting ridicule from the broader cryptocurrency community.

Solana also went down for a whopping 18 hours in September, which made the market value of the native SOL token shed more than $20 billion.  

The SOL token is holding up relatively well this time around despite another significant outage. It is down 5% over the past 24 hours, performing in line with other top “Ethereum killers” such as Terra (LUNA) and Avalanche (AVAX).