Solana Back Up Following Major 5-Hour Outage

Solana, the low-latency blockchain that's seen an explosion in activity in recent months, experienced an approximately five-hour outage on Tuesday.

Solana's SOL token slumped from around $96 before the problem began to below $94 as the incident was ongoing, but has since recovered nearly all of that loss.

Transactions resumed being processed around 15:00 UTC, blockchain data showed. They had stopped around 09:52 UTC, data showed.

The halt came nearly a year after the Solana network's last outage, on Feb. 25, 2023.

"Solana Mainnet-Beta is experiencing a performance degradation, block progression is currently halted, core engineers & validators are actively investigating," Laine, a Solana validator, said in an X post when the problem was still going on. Core engineers said they identified a fix and were building a new version for validators to upgrade, network validator @mtromp said in an X post.

In a follow-up post, Laine said that validators had begun generating snapshots using their local ledger state – or the most recent data before the outage – to prepare for a restart.

The new validator software release includes a patch to address an issue that caused the cluster to halt, said the Solana Foundation, which maintains the network. "Validator operators should prepare for an upgrade and restart of the network," it added.

Validators are entities that utilize computing power to maintain a blockchain and process transactions. Snapshots refer to an exact copy of blockchain data at a certain point in time.

Node operators were informed on Solana's Discord channel that failure to upgrade to the latest software would result in the loss of delegation status for the Solana blockchain. This means that node operators would stop receiving rewards and the network may become less secure as nodes will be less distributed.

Oliver Knight contributed reporting.

UPDATE (Feb. 6, 2023, 10:46 UTC): Updates with SOL price and system status page.

UPDATE (Feb. 6, 2023, 11:37 UTC): Updates with comment on network fix and snapshot plans.

UPDATE (Feb. 6, 2023, 15:06 UTC): Update to reflect that the problem appears to have been resolved.

UPDATE (Feb. 6, 2023, 16:03 UTC): Updates with notice for node operators to upgrade software.

CORRECTION (Feb. 6, 2023: 23:26 UTC): Corrects date of Solana's last outage to Feb. 25, 2023, instead of April 2023 as stated in a prior version.