Why Is Solana Down? Network Suffers Second Major Outage

The Solana blockchain network suffered a major outage in the hours leading up to press time. The current downtime is attributable to a known issue of increased bot usage, a plague that has afflicted the so-called “Ethereum killer” since its rise to prominence.

Solana’s mainnet beta network has struggled to handle increased adoption in recent months, with congestion often limiting the ease of user transactions. Network congestion has often kicked in during major NFT mints, with prospective buyers deploying bots to beat competition.

Block production on Solana Mainnet Beta has halted. Validator operators should prepare for a restart in mb-validators on Discord.

— Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) April 30, 2022

(Solana TPS drops)

A further update from the Solana development team confirmed that the downtime was the result of an “enormous amount of inbound transactions” from NFT minting bots. Bots tried to push through up to 4 million transactions per second, an overwhelming attempt that shuttered validator nodes.

At the time of writing, network validators are preparing to restart the Solana network cluster, a process that typically takes five to eight hours (estimates based on a similar occurrence in September). Additionally, validators are deliberating on implementing a temporary block on popular NFT minting programs including Candy Machine from Metaplex, Magic Eden, and new entrant OpenSea.

Notably, the latest outage did not result in a permanent halt of the network as in the past. However, the severity of spam transactions means that only a few validators with high compute capacity are still online. Hence, a cluster restart is required to bring all validators back to speed and get the network in full flow.

The latest downtime has resulted in SOL, Solana’s native coin dropping from around $96 to $82.50 with the hours leading up to press time.

This is a developing story..