Solana block production halts, validators confirm major outage
While Solana focuses on offering scalable solutions for a decentralized ecosystem that rivals Ethereum, it has struggled with repeated network issues such as this, drastically undermining its reliability claims.
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The Solana blockchain experienced a major outage earlier today, February 6, which halted block production on the network. Engineers across the Solana ecosystem are investigating the cause of the outage on the blockchain’s mainnet-beta.
Engineers from across the ecosystem are investigating an outage on mainnet-beta. This thread will be updated as more information becomes available https://t.co/rfeioQ6BG9
— Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) February 6, 2024
The outage began around 10:22 UTC, according to status updates from validators and Solana’s official status page. The outage was first noticed when over 25 minutes passed without a new block being produced on Solana, which aims for block times of 400 milliseconds.
“Solana Mainnet-Beta is experiencing a performance degradatation, block progression is currently halted, core engineers & validators are actively investigating,” Solana validator Laine said on X.
Solana last had an outage in February 2023. In 2022, Solana suffered a series of outages caused by node issues. In September 2021, the network went offline for 18 hours. This incident marks the 11th outage Solana has faced over the past two years.
While Solana focuses on offering scalable solutions for a decentralized ecosystem that rivals Ethereum, it has struggled with repeated network issues such as this, drastically undermining its reliability claims.
According to recent updates on the outage at the time of writing, Solana engineers have investigated and identified possible remediation but have yet to confirm whether recovery is possible without a coordinated restart across validators. The last optimistic slot was identified as 246464040, with validators awaiting the next steps.
At around 5:43 EST, Laine confirmed that engineers were already working to build a release that contained a remediation. The remediated build will be released after testing. Meanwhile, validators are already generating snapshots through local ledger states in preparation for a possible restart.
Note: This story is developing, and Crypto Briefing will update coverage details as necessary to maintain veracity.
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