Breaking: Solana Mainnet Beta Outage Root Cause Uncovered

The unprecedented Solana outage experienced earlier this month got tongues wagging as it seemed to derail the growth recorded by the protocol thus far. The Solana Outage lasted for 5 hours as several engineers worked on finding the root cause of the problem and perhaps solving it permanently.

Solana Labs has now released its root cause analysis detailing what went wrong in fulfillment of its transparency policy to the community.

The Solana Outage Root Cause Uncovered

Contrary to some opinion that suggests the Solana Outage might have been caused by a hack, in reality, the halt in block production came as a result of the “deploy-evict-request cycle of a legacy loader program triggered an infinite recompile loop in the JIT cache.”

As explained, the transactions on Solana follow an ordered pattern that was not followed before the outage, an event that resulted in the duplication of accounting information and cost additional recompile data. This got compounded as more transactions were added to the Block, thus clogging the system.

The ineffective Cache dubbed ExecutorsCache has been replaced by the new LoadedPrograms which generally bypasses the flaws of the former to prevent related clogging in the future. Per the analysis released, the bug was identified about a week earlier and was labeled the major reason behind a Devnet Outage a week before.

Since it was identified, Solana developers have been working on a fix and one of the two Legacy Loaders that was supposed to trigger the bug has been deprecated. The second is poised to be fazed out with subsequent updates to the network as a whole.

Solana Recovery and Rebooted SOL Price

The price of Solana plunged by more than 8% when the glitch was discovered and made public in what appeared as a major derailing factor in its growth trend over the past year.

This downtime was, however, short-lived as the coin swiftly rebounded and is now trading in the positive zone, At the time of writing, the coin has jumped by 2.4% in the past 24 hours to $105.13. In this period, SOL grew from a low of $102.1 to a high of $106.51 before cresting at its previous level.

Despite its historical downtimes, Solana retains many investors’ interest with promises from Solana Labs to keep updating the system to prevent any further glitches.