On the night of Saturday, January 21st, the Cardano network experienced a disruption. About 50 percent of the nodes were offline for a few minutes and block production was also affected. Before developers noticed the error, it was almost fixed by itself. A restart of the entire blockchain was therefore not necessary.
It seems Cardano’s decentralization benefited the network. Because the remaining nodes worked as usual and kept the blockchain running in the meantime. Despite this demonstration of their own resilience, developers continue to strive to find the exact source of failure in order to avoid a future failure. Not long after the incident, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson also spoke up.
“Reproducibility unlikely”
In one Update via stream Hoskinson summarizes the status of the previous investigations. The “anomaly” is therefore a “temporary problem”, presumably arising from a “collection of simultaneous events”. Hoskinson therefore considers the reproducibility of the error to be “unlikely”.
On the code management page github Meanwhile, developers were able to further narrow down the bug. You therefore know “where in the program the error originated” and “which part of the code was affected,” says Hoskinson. But apart from that, developers Cardanos seem to be groping in the dark. Hoskinson also admitted this. “Ideally, one would like to know the exact reason when a distributed system experiences such a crack”. But Cardano’s decentralized nature makes it difficult to simulate the bug in the big picture, he says.
The all-clear for Cardano for the time being
According to Hoskinson’s assessment, the incident sounds like an extremely improbable chain of events that would not occur again in this form. Of course, his team is still working on the matter to “fix any bugs,” as Hoskinson assured. As stated in an original statement by Input Output Global, one of the companies behind the project, such partial (or even complete) failures were taken into account in Cardano’s design.
Meanwhile, the Cardano founder reiterated that the incident did not harm the health of the network. “Transactions are not lost, no blocks are dropped, no money is gone, nor has the network stalled,” Hoskinson said. Instead, it “healed itself,” which the “purpose of a decentralized, distributed, and resilient system is,” as the founder explained.
