Solana network restarts after outage that lasted five hours

The Block2024/02/06 15:36

By:The Block

Quick Take The Layer 1 network Solana restarted after five hours of going dark.

The Layer 1 network Solana has restarted after going dark around five hours earlier.

"Block production on Solana mainnet beta resumed at 14:57 UTC (9:47  a.m. ET), following a successful upgrade to v1.17.20 and a restart of the cluster by validator operators. Engineers will continue to monitor performance as network operations are restored," the network wrote in an incident report .

"The outage began at approximately 09:53 UTC, lasting 5 hours. Core contributors are working on a root cause report, which will be made available once complete," the report continued.

Matthew Sigel, Head of digital assets research at VanEck, wrote on X that the "Berkley Packet Filter” mechanism to deploy upgrade and execute programs on Solana seemed to be responsible for the failure.

"This seems to relate to a previous SMID (Solana Improvement Proposal) that altered some of the features including the adding a blocker to stop metadata from being used in the BPF because it was no longer needed," he wrote.

The outage

At 10:22 UTC (5:22 a.m. ET), Solana wrote in a network status notice that "engineers from across the ecosystem are investigating an outage on mainnet-beta."

The disruption caused block progression to halt, meaning transactions couldn't go through, The Block previously reported .

After around two hours of attempting to fix the matter, Solana Status, a page run by the Solana Foundation, said on the social media platform X that "engineers from across the ecosystem are readying a new validator software release, which includes a patch to address an issue which caused the cluster to halt. Validator operators should prepare for an upgrade and restart of the network."

The last time Solana experienced a "Major Outage" was in February 2023 , when the blockchain was down for a few hours. After two restart attempts, the network came back online.

Disclaimer: The content of this article solely reflects the author's opinion and does not represent the platform in any capacity. This article is not intended to serve as a reference for making investment decisions.