Solana Blockchain suffered outage on Tuesday that resulted in the stoppage of processing of transaction blocks on the network. The issue now seems resolved after a restart of the network.
Solana Status, a Twitter account run by Solana Foundation that provides updates about the Solana Network, on Tuesday Evening, September 14, announced that the Solana mainnet beta network is experiencing so called “intermittent instability”. The announcement reads:
Solana mainnet-beta is experiencing intermittent instability. This began approximately 45 minutes ago, and engineers are investigating the issue.
— Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) September 14, 2021
“Solana mainnet-beta is experiencing intermittent instability. This began approximately 45 minutes ago, and engineers are investigating the issue.”
According to the initial explanation provided at the time, “resource exhaustion in the network” was “causing a denial of service.” “Engineers are working towards a resolution. Validators are preparing for a potential restart if necessary,” the team added.
Phantom, a Solana-based DeFi and NFT wallet service, also reported that its application was having trouble connecting with the network. Phantom users also reported problems accessing their wallet and SOL balance. A user replied to Phantom as:
“I can access my wallet but now all my staked SOL isn’t showing up. HELP PLEASE!”
The problem remained unsolved for many hours as users were complaining even after 8 or 9 hours after the issue was first announced.
About 7 hours after the first announcement, Solana Status published the details of problem according to which, a large increase in transaction load on the network caused the stoppage of transaction processing. The details explain:
1/ Solana Mainnet Beta encountered a large increase in transaction load which peaked at 400,000 TPS. These transactions flooded the transaction processing queue, and lack of prioritization of network-critical messaging caused the network to start forking.
— Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) September 14, 2021
“Solana Mainnet Beta encountered a large increase in transaction load which peaked at 400,000 TPS. These transactions flooded the transaction processing queue, and lack of prioritization of network-critical messaging caused the network to start forking.”
The issue persisted so long because engineers were unsuccessful in tackling the situation. Solana Status added:
“This forking led to excessive memory consumption, causing some nodes to go offline. Engineers across the ecosystem attempted to stabilize the network, but were unsuccessful.”
According to details, the validator community then elected to a restart of the network, while the community prepared for a new release of mainnet beta. On Wednesday Morning, the version 1.6.25 of mainnet beta was released.
According to the latest update from Solana Status, the network has been restarted after an upgrade to the newer version of mainnet beta. The latest update reads:
The Solana validator community successfully completed a restart of Mainnet Beta after an upgrade to 1.6.25. Dapps, block explorers, and supporting systems will recover over the next several hours, at which point full functionality should be restored.
— Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) September 15, 2021
“The Solana validator community successfully completed a restart of Mainnet Beta after an upgrade to 1.6.25. Dapps, block explorers, and supporting systems will recover over the next several hours, at which point full functionality should be restored.”
