A misconfigured node has triggered another outage on the Solana blockchain. The effort has led to the Solana network halting transaction processing, and it went offline on Friday. This adds to the several outages that Solana has had since January.
Solana suffers another major outage
Solana announced that its blockchain had stopped processing transactions. The outage comes a year after Solana suffered an 18-hour outage in September last year. The SOL token has not been performing well this year because of the crypto winter, and it has plunged by 87% from its all-time highs created in November last year.
On Friday, Solana Status, a Twitter page operated by the Solana Foundation, announced it was experiencing poor performance and that Solana developers were working on detecting the issue. After a while, Solana said that the blockchain had halted, and it was no longer processing transactions.
One of the Solana validators tweeted about the cause of the outage, saying that “a misconfigured node caused an unrecoverable partition in the network.”
The validator further said that the Solana codebase could have solved the issue. However, the issue led to an unrecoverable fork or partition. He added that the misconfigured node could have been caused by accident in the setup of the failed node.
The Solana developers said the network would be rebooted to solve the issue. The boot-up was complete at the time of writing, and the Solana network had been restarted.
Solana Status has also issued an update on the status of the network, saying that “Validator operators successfully completed a cluster restart of Mainnet Beta at 7 AM UTC. Network operators and dapps will continue to restore client services over the next several hours.”
Solana suffers from repeated outages
Solana executives have in the past conflicted with media reports on the number of outages that the network has suffered over the past year. Some media reports put the total number of Solana outages as high as 12.
The co-founder of Solana Labs, Anatoly Yakovenko, interviewed with Real Vision earlier this month saying that the Solana network outages have been a “curse.” However, he alluded that outages were not new in the crypto space, adding that the Bitcoin network has had hours of delays between block production.
The Solana blockchain has touted itself as an Ethereum killer. The network offers high transaction speeds and charges low costs, making it a hub for various crypto apps. After the Ethereum Merge on September 15, Solana became the third-largest proof-of-stake blockchain after Ethereum and Cardano.
However, the frequent outages on the Solana blockchain threaten the ability of the blockchain to continue attracting developers and remain one of the largest blockchain networks. The crypto community has criticized the blockchain over these outages, saying that they show that the network is unreliable. However, the Solana community has argued that the network is still in beta and that such occurrences were normal.