Solana Network Experiences Major Outage, as Engineers Investigate and Take Action

The Solana network has encountered a disruption on February 6th at 10:22 UTC, prompting a collaborative effort among engineers from various corners of the ecosystem to address the issue on the mainnet beta.

Validators and developers swiftly acted in response to the outage, with Solana validators initiating preparations for a restart approximately one hour after the onset of the incident. They began generating snapshots for slot 246464040 and are set to reboot the Mainnet-Beta cluster using version 1.17.20, alongside the availability of the jito-solana release.

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During the outage, block production on the Solana mainnet stopped, halting block progression. The Solana blockchain explorer indicated the severity of the situation by flashing a "major outage" warning for the mainnet.

Social media users were among the first to notice the prolonged absence of block production, which deviated significantly from the network's typical block production time of 400 milliseconds.

Solana validator Stakewiz confirmed that developers were actively working on a release containing a fix for the issue. In anticipation of the restart, validators initiated the generation of snapshots using their local ledger state. These snapshots serve as a point-in-time representation of the global Solana state at a specific slot, ensuring consistency across the network.

Version v1.17.20 was released by Solana, accompanied by instructions for validators to upgrade and restart the network. However, the outage has already started to impact cryptocurrency exchanges, with Upbit announcing the suspension of deposits and withdrawals for Solana-based tokens.

Solana has had outages before, but it's been a while since the last one. In February 2023, the network experienced a similar disruption, lasting almost 20 hours. Efforts to find a long-term solution have been ongoing, with the introduction of the Firedancer client being a significant step forward.

In general, certain network outages on Solana have stemmed from problems with the software used by its validators. For this reason, the aim of developing Firedancer is to create an additional software backup, enhancing the network's resilience in case of issues with the primary software.

It is worth noting that the recent major outage on the Solana network has had a noticeable effect on the price of SOL, causing it to drop by more than 3%.

According to CoinGecko data, SOL's price fell to $93.36 before rebounding slightly to its current level of $93.70, representing a 4.1% decrease in a single day and over an 11% decline over the past week.

Despite these challenges, Solana has had many positive moments. In fact, last week, the network saw a surge in activity, with trading volume on Solana decentralized exchanges briefly surpassing that of Ethereum DEXs.