Solana Network Hit With Technical Glitch Hours After Update

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Jeff Horseman
Jeff Horseman
Jeff Horseman got into journalism because he liked to write and stunk at math. He grew up in Vermont and he honed his interviewing skills as a supermarket cashier by asking Bernie Sanders “Paper or plastic?” After graduating from Syracuse University in 1999, Jeff began his journalistic odyssey at The Watertown Daily Times in upstate New York, where he impressed then-U.S. Senate candidate Hillary Clinton so much she called him “John” at the end of an interview. From there, he went to Annapolis, Maryland, where he covered city, county and state government at The Capital newspaper. Today, Jeff writes about anything and everything. Along the way, Jeff has covered wildfires, a tropical storm, 9/11 and the Dec. 2 terror attack in San Bernardino. If you have a question or story idea about politics or the inner workings of government, please let Jeff know. He’ll do his best to answer, even if it involves a little math.
  • Almost all on-chain action on the Solana network has ground to a halt.
  • The network was only able to execute roughly 93 transactions per second (TPS).

As a technical glitch slowed users’ ability to trade cryptocurrencies, move assets, or do anything on the Solana network’s blockchain early Saturday, infrastructure providers scrambled to fix the problem. According to Solana’s Discord channel, the blockchain began “forking” at about 00:53 New York time. After that, the RAM of validators skyrocketed, but the chain’s transaction throughput plummeted.

Because of the confluence of these technical issues, almost all on-chain action on the Solana network has ground to a halt. The data site Solana Explorer shows that around 02:00, the network was only able to execute roughly 93 transactions per second (TPS), down significantly from the nearly 5000 TPS seen 15 minutes earlier.

Updated Solana Code

It was a crisis somewhat to that which occurred in the chain’s technology in 2022 when a number of breakdowns and slowdowns required changes to the way in which Solana handles incoming traffic. No one was immediately blamed for the disaster on Saturday, although validator operators and network engineers suspected a flaw in the updated Solana code that had only gone live hours before.

According to the anonymous SolBlaze, which operates a liquid staking pool and is involved in the development community, some validators have begun downgrading to the prior version in the hopes of recovering Solana’s throughput. After some time, Solana’s own staff members started calling for the demotion, too.

Within a few hours, the vast majority of validators had reverted to the previous software in an effort to get Solana back up and running. Yet that didn’t help much with the mystery pulling-down performance. Further extreme measures were taken, including resetting the chain to the instant before the fork.

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