Solana Blockchain Suffered A Major Downtime for 7 Hours Last Weekend

03. May 2022 Posted by Akolkar B on News

Solana, the Layer-1 competitor to the Ethereum blockchain network has been through a rocky ride this year in 2022. Last weekend between April 30-May 1 the Solana blockchain suffered yet another outage suffering a downtime of 7 long hours.

This happened as the Solana PoS blockchain witnessed an insane amount of incoming traffic knocking the validators out of consensus and getting the block production to a complete halt.

In its official blog post, Solana explains: “The specific reason why consensus stalled was due to validators running out of memory and crashing. The root cause of the high memory usage was insufficient votes landing to finalize earlier blocks, preventing abandoned fork cleanup. The number of forks validators had to evaluate exceeded their capacity to do so, even after a reboot, necessitating manual intervention”.

As per the investigation, the bots managed to exploit the popular Solana-based non-fungible token (NFT) minting tool dubbed Candy Machine last Saturday. These bots then performed four million transactions sending 100 gigabits of data every second.

Metaplex, the company behind the Solana-based NFT project Candy Machine also appraised of the situation. On Sunday, May 1, Metaplex tweeted: “Today #Solana mainnet-beta went down partially due to botting on the Metaplex Candy Machine program. To combat this, we have merged and will soon deploy a botting penalty to the program as part of a broader effort to stabilize the network”.

As a cautious measure, Metaplex said that it will charge some fee to prevent bot wallets from completing invalid transactions. It will also initiate measure to prevent humans from paying the penalties. For this, the front-end mining bots have to validate whether if the target Candy Machines are eligible for minting.

The recent outage caused the SOL price to tank immediately by 7% on the weekend. However, the SOL price has recovered since then and is currently trading around $90.

The Solana blockchain has recently shown some vulnerability to external attacks. The network has reported multiple outages so far in 2022.

The Solana blockchain suffered one of its major outages last year in September 2021, wherein the downtime was as along as 17 hours. Hopefully, the Solana developers shall come up with some major upgrades ahead this year making the network more robust and resilient to external attacks.