The Solana blockchain (SOL) was down for more than 7 hours on Saturday night following a bot attack on the “Candy Machine”, which is used to mine non-fungible tokens (NFTs). This is the 7th network outage since the beginning of this year.
Solana suffers another network failure
The Solana blockchain (SOL) has experienced some problems this weekend. Indeed, during the night of Saturday to Sunday, the network suffered a crash before returning to normal after 7 long hours.
The cause of the failure was an influx of bots on the “Candy Machine”, a popular tool on Solana used to mine non-fungible tokens (NFTs). More than 4 million transactions were sent to the network by the bots, the equivalent of more than 100 gigabits of data per second.
The network became saturated, and the node validators were no longer able to establish a consensus to validate transactions. The blockchain came to a complete halt at around 10pm on Saturday evening, before being restarted 7 hours later by the network validators who were jointly given the steps to follow via a Discord server.
A joint effort praised by Anatoly Yakavenko, the co-founder of Solana Labs, explaining that he was unreachable during the outage:
“Solana’s community of validators are legends. It’s amazing to see so many new people step up and take charge of getting things back on track. “
Validator operators successfully completed a cluster restart of Mainnet Beta at 3:00 AM UTC, following a roughly 7 hour outage after the network failed to reach consensus.
Network operators and dapps will continue to restore client services over the next several hours. https://t.co/ezqEYQYKWl
– Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) May 1, 2022
To prevent a future outage of this kind and to keep bots out, Metaplex, the originator of the Candy Machine, has announced that a 0.01 SOL penalty will now be applied to wallets attempting to make an invalid transaction, which it says is “usually done by bots blindly trying to mine”.
This is the 7th failure this year for the Solana blockchain, whose mainnet is officially still in Beta phase. This is the umpteenth crash for the Solana network, which has annoyed many users who have shown their displeasure on Twitter.
The price of the SOL was only briefly affected, dropping from 91.65 dollars to 85 dollars, before rising quickly to stabilise. It is currently at $86.79 at the time of writing.
