Solana is Down For Hours: Validators Planning Network Restart (Update: Resolved)

Solana mainnet has stopped processing transactions. The popular blockchain halted over 7 hours ago. Meanwhile, Ethereum layer 2 solution Arbitrum has experienced an outage.

Potential Restart Incoming

As tweeted by Solana Status, the Solana mainnet began experiencing “intermittent instability” several hours ago, and developers are still getting to the bottom of it.

The account followed up two hours later, revealing that “resource exhaustion” was causing a denial of service on the network. According to Solana’s CEO, Anatoly Yakovenko, the outage has been caused by “Raydium IDO bots trying to snipe the tokens at launch.”

Apparently, the network validators are preparing for a “potential restart” if necessary, though there is some confusion about what a “restart” would entail.

Update as of Sep-15, 06:45 UTC: Issue Resolved

After over 80% of the validators restarted and upgraded to version 1.6.25, the Solana mainnet beta network is up again.

“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.” according to SolanaStatus.

Intermittent Performance Degradation

This comes after the network experienced “intermittent performance degradation” for about an hour at the beginning of this month, before quickly resolving the issue.

Meanwhile, Arbitrum, the layer 2 protocol designed to help scale the Ethereum network, experienced an outage at the same time as Solana. Curiously, the Arbitrum team gave an update later saying that the network has since been fully restored, yet many online are reporting that it has already gone back down again.

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

Despite Solana is experiencing outages, the price of SOL hadn’t been much affected. At least at the time of writing these lines. Currently, the SOL price is trading amid the $150 area, after recording a daily high of $171 as the trouble started, according to Binance.

So far, SOL has blessed its holders, following an imaginary ROI of over 13,700% since the beginning of the year.