Solana suffers a new major breakdown that endangers its continuity

On Friday, a misconfigured node caused the Solana network to stop processing transactions and go offline. This is the fourth major outage for the popular blockchain since January, when it experienced a series of partial outages for most of the month, according to Solana data.

This outage comes a year after a nearly 18-hour outage last September. Meanwhile, the crushing cryptographic winter has caused SOL to drop 81 percent in 2022.

On Friday night, the Solana Status site, run by the Solana Foundationpublished that the network “was experiencing degraded performance” and that Solana’s developers were working to diagnose the problem. Shortly thereafter, Solana reported that the network was “down and was not processing transactions“.

The Solana network is experiencing an outage and not processing transactions. Developers across the ecosystem are working on diagnosing the issue and to restart the network. More information will be provided as it becomes available.

– Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) October 1, 2022

What is the cause of the failure?

“It appears that a misconfigured node caused an unrecoverable partition in the network“, tweeted validator Solana behind Stakewiz.com about the incident.

He continued on Twitter, “One validator was running a duplicate validator instance. This means that when it was his turn to produce a block, he would produce one of each instance, for the same slot, so some validators would see the first block, others would see the others, and then couldn’t agree on which was the correct one.“

Stakewiz said that the Solana codebase should have handled the problem, but for some unknown reason it caused an unrecoverable partition or fork. They believe the misconfiguration was an accident,”probably a failed node failover configuration.“Developers rebooted the Solana backbone at the last confirmed slot, 153139220. At the time of publication, the reboot was 49% complete, and Solana had been down for 2 hours and 45 minutes.

Solana Mainnet restart is underway, we need 80% of stake to restart.

Track it here: https://t.co/2tIgKBCAHO

– Laine ❤️ stakewiz.com (@laine_sa_) October 1, 2022

What did Solana say about his breakdowns?

Although Solana executives have criticized the crypto media’s various counts of the total number of outages in the past, founder Anatoly Yakovenko told Real Vision earlier this month that the outages were “our curse” and pointed out that the Bitcoin blockchain has sometimes experienced hours of gaps between blocks.

Solana, one of several smart contract blockchains touted as the “killers ofEthereum“, is a popular blockchain for non-fungible token coinage, NFTs, and decentralized applications. After Ethereum’s transition to proof-of-stake on September 15, Solana is now the third largest proof-of-stake blockchain in terms of market capitalization, behind Ethereum and Cardano.

But to continue to grow and compete with Ethereum, the network will need to stay put.