Avalanche Network Faces Block Production Halt for Over Four Hours

A technical snag has hit Layer-1 network Avalanche, causing a halt in block production for over four hours, as confirmed by its status page and block explorer.

Kevin Sekniqi, co-founder of Ava Labs, shed light on the issue, suggesting it may be linked to a recent surge in inscriptions.

Inscriptions, a mechanism for recording arbitrary data on a blockchain without smart contracts, originated on Bitcoin and have since been utilized for activities like minting non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

The block production pause on Avalanche commenced at 11:13 UTC.

"Developers across the community are currently investigating a stall in block finalization that is preventing blocks from being accepted on the Primary Network," a notice on Avalanche’s website states.

The network's native token, AVAX, has seen a decline of 2.95% following the outage.

Conversely, the CoinDesk CD20 Index has experienced a 0.65% increase during the same timeframe.

It is worth noting that on February 6th at 10:22 UTC, the Solana network also experienced a disruption, prompting a collaborative effort among engineers to resolve the issue on the mainnet beta.

Validators and developers promptly responded to the outage, initiating preparations for a restart approximately one hour later. They began generating snapshots for slot 246464040 and plan to reboot the Mainnet-Beta cluster using version 1.17.20, alongside the availability of the jito-solana release.

During the outage, block production on the Solana mainnet ceased, halting block progression. The severity of the situation was indicated by the Solana blockchain explorer, which displayed a “major outage” warning. Nonetheless, it was restored