Solana’s price rebounded late Tuesday morning after the network recovered from an outage which had, hours prior, triggered a dip in the cryptocurrency’s price.
SOL is currently up to $95.90, an almost full recovery to the position of $96.02 that the token held at 5:00 am EST this morning, prior to the network’s failure.
Around 5:22 am EST, Solana developers posted that the network had suffered a “major outage.” Immediately, SOL began plummeting, hitting a low of $93.36 minutes later. All in all, the coin shed over 4% before returning to its current price.
According to Solana’s network status page, the outage lasted four hours and 46 minutes before it was finally resolved. Mainnet validators had to restart their nodes with new software from Solana Labs that included a patch to address the issue.
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Block production on Solana mainnet beta resumed at 14:57 UTC, following a successful upgrade to v1.17.20 and a restart of the cluster by validator operators. Engineers will continue to monitor performance as network operations are restored.
The Solana Foundation has not yet released a formal statement about the cause of the outage, but did say it is currently preparing a root cause report. A tweet from VanEck Head of Digital Assets Research Matthew Sigel—which has been reshared by Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko and other notable developers—blames a bug that had been found and patched on Solana’s testnet, but not yet fixed on the main network.
Solana outage, what happened? BPF loader, the “Berkley Packet Filter,” which is the mechanism to deploy upgrade and execute programs on Solana, failed. This seems to relate to a previous SMID (Solana Improvement Proposal) that altered some of the features including the adding a…
— matthew sigel, recovering CFA (@matthew_sigel) February 6, 2024
Tuesday’s incident is not the first time the Solana network has experienced prolonged issues. Just under a year ago, Solana went dark for about 19 hours following a network upgrade. Weeks later, the Solana Foundation blamed the issue on “custom block-forwarding software” used by various apps that had overwhelmed the network.
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While such outages are relatively uncommon occurrences for Solana, their existence in any frequency are not ideal given the network’s ambition to become a mainstay blockchain ecosystem undergirding finance, commerce, and communication.
In the last few months, Solana has seen an exceptional rise in activity. Last week, token trading volume on the network’s decentralized exchanges briefly eclipsed that on dominant rival Ethereum.
