Downed Solana is back online after developers rush to restart blockchain

The Solana network was hit by yet another outage on Tuesday, falling just short of a one-year, outage-free anniversary.
Developers issued a patch and restarted the network after being down for five hours.
Despite a history of outages, network activity continues to rise.

Solana’s blockchain is back processing transactions after a “major outage” that halted its operations for about five hours on Tuesday, per a network status report.

Today’s outage began at about 9:52 AM GMT when the network stopped producing transaction blocks.

The Solana team soon acknowledged the issue, announcing that engineers were working to restore service.

To get the network up and running again, developers released a new software patch for the blockchain designed to address the problem, restarting the network at about 2:47 PM GMT.

Users could monitor the process via a dashboard created by Solana validator Stakewiz.

The network restart happened when the dashboard’s progress bar crossed the 80% mark — the threshold for restarting the network in terms of gossip between active validators.

Gossip in Solana is a communication protocol used by network participants. Gossiping is how Solana’s blockchain sends data across network nodes when the blockchain is functioning properly.

The Solana Beach dashboard, a portal for Solana metrics, also shows the network is up and running again.

Join the community to get our latest stories and updates

What downed Solana this time?

While the chain is back up, the cause of today’s outage has not been revealed publicly.

“Core contributors are working on a root cause report, which will be made available once complete,” the Solana team said via its X account. Members of Solana’s core team did not immediately respond to DL News’ request for comment.

Solana’s native coin SOL dipped 4% during the network outage, data from DefiLlama shows.

While Solana has suffered numerous network problems of varying severity over the last three years, today’s outage interrupted a nearly one-year unbroken record of zero downtime for the blockchain.

The last network pause happened on February 25, 2023, and lasted almost two days. That issue was caused by a flood of transactions related to a viral NFT mint that overwhelmed the network.

Tuesday’s outage comes amid a hefty resurgence for the blockchain, which has seen its DeFi market size quintuple to $1.7 billion since October last year.

The bulk of this growth has been driven by airdrop and meme coin speculation and has triggered a wave of liquidity migration from other blockchains, including Ethereum.

Osato Avan-Nomayo is our Nigeria-based DeFi correspondent. He covers DeFi and tech. To share tips or information about stories, please contact him at osato@dlnews.com.