Solana Down: What’s the Reason Behind Recurrent Outages

Solana Down: Solana engineers released a new validator software release for validator operators to upgrade and restart of the Solana network after an outage for 5 hours. All Solana-related activities including spot and derivatives trading, staking, and others halted after Solana stopped processing blocks at 10:00 UTC on Tuesday.

Solana team has yet to reveal a report on the Solana outage. It said, “Core contributors are working on a root cause report, which will be made available once complete.”

Solana Release Patch For Network Restart

Solana Status in the latest post on February 6 revealed that a new validator software release, release version v1.17.20, is available for upgrade. This includes a patch to resolve the cluster issue that caused the network to halt. Engineers from across the ecosystem readied the software release. Validator operators were asked to prepare for an upgrade and restart of the network.

In an earlier post, Solana team said “Engineers from across the ecosystem are investigating an outage on mainnet-beta.” The team updates the community in real time as more information becomes available.

As per Stakewiz data, Solana network start is underway as validators install the software release. Once 80% of the stake has restarted, the cluster resumed block production from slot 246464041. The block production on Solana mainnet beta resumed at 14:57 UTC.

South Korea’s largest crypto exchange Upbit decided to temporarily suspend deposits and withdrawals for SOL, GMT, RAY, and ACS tokens due to the ongoing Solana network outage.

Read More: Solana Outage Casts Shadow On SOL, GMT, RAY, ACS Trading

Reason Behind Outages

Solana Mainnet Beta suffered a significant performance degradation again, similar to last year. Solana blockchain has suffered over a dozen outages in the last few years. While the team will release a root cause report soon, experts pointed out the design of the system as the major reason.

Matthew Sigel, head of digital assets research at VanEck, claims BPF loader failure was the reason behind the latest outage. The Berkley Packet Filter (BPF) is a mechanism to deploy upgrade and execute programs on Solana. A bug was triggered, relating to earlier SMID (Solana Improvement Proposal) which added a blocker to stop metadata from being used in the BPF.

Moreover, 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.

Also Read: Solana Outage: Fix Released For Validator Operators To Restart Network

Solana Missed 100% Uptime

Solana network has missed its 100% uptime for a year by 20 days, as per data by Solana Status. The network suffered a major outage for 18 hours on February 25 due to cluster instability that happened after the v1.14 upgrade causing block finalization to slow significantly.

SOL price fell 4% after the outage on Tuesday, reducing the community’s sentiment on Solana and prices. However, the price is currently trading at $100, up over 5% in the last 24 hours amid a crypto market recovery on Thursday.