Unidentified Bug Halts Solana Network
2 min readFor approximately six hours, the Solana network shut down and did not validate any transactions. A still-unidentified bug caused the outage.
According to the official Solana Medium page, an open writing platform, Solana stopped producing blocks at slot 53,180,900. This meant that no new transactions could be confirmed. The Solana team claimed no funds were at risk. However, it took the Solana team and approximately 200 validators almost six hours until they could ‘reset’ the network and get it back up and running again.
What caused this to happen?
The Solana team stated that they will conduct a “post mortem” to dissect and better understand what caused this issue at its root. For now, things remain very unclear. All that we are sure of is that the network was unusable for almost six hours. Also, the team needed 80 percent or more of their validators in order to “restart” the network. For that to occur, this large majority needed to agree to the implementation of the Solana plan. Apparently, this took some time to properly execute.
Reactions from the crypto space
The Solana team received mixed reactions about how they handled this situation. Some praised their work while others were extremely critical. Many critics from the Ethereum community and other base layer blockchain protocols were quick to frame Solana’s response negatively, and belittled the network for its apparent problems.
Solana did receive support from many influential members of the blockchain ecosystem, such as researchers and developers from the Ethereum Foundation. In the middle of large amounts of criticism, former Ethereum Foundation member Nick Johnson came to their support. Johnson tweeted,
“Watching people dump on Solana because it had a consensus issue is depressing. Let’s not evolve into Ethereum maximalists, eh? Especially over something that could easily bite us in the ass some day in the future”.
Although it may take some time before the Solana team can diagnose and share exactly what went wrong with their platform, it seems that many are still strongly supporting the project. Fortunately for Solana, it seems their community did not give up on them. The price action behind the project’s native currency, SOL, barely reacted to this massive event. In the last 24 hours, SOL is down only slightly over one percent. In the cryptocurrency market this does not represent significant market movement.
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