Breaking: Solana Releases Report On Mainnet Beta Outage, Is SOL Price Dump Next?

Solana Foundation releases a report on hours-long network slowdown and technical problems that started on Saturday. The blockchain suffering yet another outage has caused immense angst in the community as a major issue happened during the upgrade from 1.13 to 1.14.

Solana Status in a tweet on February 27 announced the Solana Mainnet Beta Outage Report to provide details on the reasons behind the outage on February 25. While the root cause of the outage is still unknown, the team is actively investigating to find the exact reason. The report will be updated periodically as new details become available.

According to the report, Solana Mainnet Beta suffered a significant performance degradation at 05:46:16 UTC on February 25. Validators took charge and restarted the chain with the previous upgrade, returning the normal network functions on Sunday at 01:28 UTC.

Solana went down for over 20 hours without a single successful transaction. Validator nodes automatically entered vote-only mode, a ‘safe mode’ designed to help the network recover in the event of data unavailability.

The validator community collectively agreed with engineers to downgrade to the previous stable release, v1.13.6, at the same time to reduce restart risk. The rollback was decided in the second restart attempt as engineers called off an initial restart attempt to collect more data on the outage.

Reason Behind Continuous Outage on Solana Blockchain

Solana blockchain has suffered over a dozen outages in the last 2 years. The major reason pointed out by experts is the design of the system.

Solana handles all their consensus on-chain, which means all validator communications are on the chain just like a transaction. It causes transaction volume as well as TPS to rise massively.

The pink part depicts actual transactions, which are just 10% on the chain. While the major part is validator messages, votes, etc., which make up 90-95%. It causes the Solana blockchain to suffer outages as more activity impacts the system performance.

SOL price is currently trading sideways at $22.83 after a decline in the last two days. Solana is down nearly 15% in a week, with trading volume also falling massively.

Also Read: Ethereum Developers Reveal Key Details Ahead Of the Shanghai Upgrade