So far, the year has not turned out to be a good one for the Solana blockchain. The network has had to face partial or full outages about seven different times within a timespan of about 12 months. The Solana blockchain was once more offline because of a bug. On Wednesday, block production had come to a halt at about 16:55 and this latest outage continued for a period of about four and a half hours. According to a report of the incident, the mainnet was restarted by the validator operators at about 21:00 UTC.
Anatoly Yakovenko, the co-founder of Solana Labs, revealed that the outage had occurred because of a durable nonce instruction that did not allow a consensus to be formed. A part of the network was pushed to consider the block invalid and this led to the outage. As per the official documentation that Solana has provided, ‘durable transaction nonce’ is a mechanism that focuses on the transaction block hash’s short lifespan. The feature had a bug because of which different outputs were generated by a nodes, thereby leading to consensus failure. Ultimately, the blockchain had gone offline. The feature had been disabled in order to restart the network.
Moreover, Yakovenko also added that they would fix the bug and eliminate it as soon as possible. With such a long downtime, it was a given that the Solana community would not be pleased and there was a significant amount of backlash. Many people said that they had believed in Solana, but now they were doubtful about its reliability and potential. Of course, the downtime of the Solana blockchain meant that SOL would also be affected. The token took a battering as its price plunged by almost 14% within 12 hours or so and moved below the $40 mark.
The native token of the Solana network has now declined by almost 85% from the all-time high value it had reached in November last year at $260. If a fall in price continues, the token will no longer be in the list of top 10 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization. Known as the ‘Ethereum killer’ there have been seven incidents since September 2021 that the Solana blockchain has gone offline, whether partially, or fully. In September last year, the blockchainhad suffered two outages because of denial-of-service attacks. January saw the network face another round of problems because of degraded performance and service disruptions. Out of 31 days in January, these problems continued for about 9 days.
The second outage that happened in the month was blamed on duplicate transactions. The network went down once later in April and then early May. This downtime was eight hours long and occurred because the network had become overwhelmed by minting bots for non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Furthermore, it should be noted that the clock of the Solana blockchain is already slow and is about 30 minutes behind. This is because of the block times that are longer than normal.