Solana Goes Down for Over 6 Hours: Validators Prepare for Restart

The Solana network is once again experiencing technical difficulties, causing the blockchain to halt block production and transaction processing. After multiple hours, the team has identified the problem and is coordinating a network restart among validators.

• According to the Solana blockchain explorer Solana Beach, a transaction has not been processed on Solana for 6 hours and 48 minutes, at the time of writing.
• Solana Status reported the problem on Twitter less than three hours ago and called on all validators to be prepared for a network restart.
• Later, the team identified the cause of the problem: “A bug in the durable nonce transactions feature led to nondeterminism when nodes generated different results for the same block, which prevented the network from advancing,” they explained.
• To remedy the issue, engineers are readying an update that will temporarily disable the durable nonce transaction feature, until a full-fledged patch is developed.
• For now, all network funds are secure, but transactions cannot be processed as no blocks are being created. Blocks are the data units in which new transactions are added to a cryptocurrency’s ledger over time.
• Back in September, Solana experienced a similar outage due to “resource exhaustion” that caused a denial of service across the network.
• In January, the network again experienced a major slowdown from an influx of “high compute transactions,” causing many others to fail. Even last month, millions of NFT transactions caused the network to clog and go down again.
• Normally, Solana is known to boast a throughput of up to 50,000 tps, making for faster and cheaper transfers than alternative chains.
• By contrast, Ethereum has experienced millions of failed-yet-paid transactions in recent months, largely due to high gas fees.