After a year without a major incident, the Solana blockchain has once again encountered difficulties, to the point where block production was completely halted for over 4 hours. The incident was confirmed by Solana Status, which reported a complete shutdown of the cluster, forcing developers to deploy a patch to resolve the issue.
Solana blockchain goes down again
It’s been a year since the Solana blockchain went down, much to the delight of its assiduous users. Recently, it had even illustrated its resilience after experiencing a significant increase in the number of transactions due to the airdrop surrounding liquidity aggregator Jupiter, which massively distributed its JUP and WEN tokens to eligible addresses.
But today, Solana has broken down again, to the point where block production has been halted. At the time of writing, the outage had lasted over 5 hours. This was made official via the official Solana Status account around 11:20 this morning:
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 thread was updated an hour later, indicating that Solana developers were working to deploy a patch to fix “an issue that caused the cluster to shut down”. At around 12:50pm, the patch in question was shared on GitHub, so that network validators could perform the update and carry out a coordinated restart of the blokchain.
Validator Laine reported at 4pm that the blockchain had finally managed to restart after a slight delay observed following the fork. The resumption of activity on Solana is indeed visible on the Solscan explorer:
Evolution of activity on Solana in 30-minute increments
Technical details of the outage have not yet been revealed, but we do know that a problem has affected the Solana cluster. A cluster is a group of interconnected nodes that work together to secure the network and improve its performance by distributing tasks and ensuring data redundancy.
