Today, a misconfigured node led the Solana network to cease processing transactions and shut off for hours during this Friday, September 30th.
This is already the fourth significant outage for the popular blockchain had since January – when it had a spate of partial outages throughout most of 2022’s first month.
This disruption comes one year after a roughly 18-hour outage in September of last year. Meanwhile, the devastating crypto winter has driven SOL, the ninth most valuable cryptocurrency by market capitalization, down 81% in 2022.
On Friday night, around 7:01 p.m. EST, Solana Foundation, reported that the network was “experiencing decreased performance” and that Solana engineers were trying to resolve the problem.
“The Solana network is experiencing an outage and not processing transactions.” Solana Foundation wrote on Twitter, at the time of the mishappening. “Developers across the ecosystem are working on diagnosing the issue and to restart the network. More information will be provided as it becomes available.”
Network Outage Cause
The Twitter account “@laine_sa_” – one of Solana’s most important validators – spoke about the outage on his profile.
According to it, a misconfiguration in a node caused an “unrecoverable partition of the network”.
In a statement provided to Decrypt, @laine_la_ went into further detail about the subject.
“A validator was running a duplicate validator instance.” They said. “When it was their turn to produce a block, they produced one from each instance, for the same slot, so some validators saw the one block, some the others, then couldn’t agree which one was correct.”
Disappointing News After Promises of Recent Updates Would Fix Solana’s Outages
This news could not be more disappointing for Solana investors and enthusiasts around the world.
A couple of months ago, the blockchain underwent important updates which significantly improved Solana’s scalability.
The Google-supported QUIC protocol was perhaps the most significant of the recent blockchain upgrades. For some years, the QUIC protocol implementation has been subjected to stress testing on Solana.
Validators have also been working hard to upgrade to the most recent software in order to bring everyone up to speed.
Given the past adjustments and the fact that there are around 2000 validators, this was extremely difficult.
Surprisingly, this has resulted in a Nakamoto Coefficient (the minimal number of compromised nodes necessary to alter the blockchain) of 32. Higher than the vast majority of Solana’s opponents.
The update proved successful in handling Solana’s transactions up until now.
