Solana Restarts After 5 Hours Of Outage, SOL Reacts
The Solana blockchain suffered a major outage recently that prevented transactions and halted block production for nearly five hours before engineers identified and patched a core software issue.
Key details on the Solana disruption:
- The network went dark around 9:53 AM UTC Tuesday and lasted 5 hours.
- Engineers traced the cause to a software glitch related to the upgrade feature.
- Led to a complete transaction halt as blocks stopped being produced.
- Required coordinated validator restart after deploying fix in new release
The Solana Status X account notified users that engineers were investigating an outage on Solana’s mainnet beta network starting at 10:22 AM UTC Tuesday morning.
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The identified problem resulted in a complete disruption of Solana’s pipeline for adding and confirming transaction groups into new blocks. Without the ability to mint blocks, no payments or dapps could be processed.
After two hours of frantic troubleshooting failed to revive stuck blocks, Solana’s status page indicated that “engineers from across the ecosystem are readying a new validator software release,” including critical patches.
Solana blockchain restarts after 5 hours
The software fix was compiled into the new v1.17.20 upgrade. By 14:57 UTC, Solana declared that block production had successfully come back online following the restart.
Matthew Sigel, digital asset researcher at major Solana stakeholder VanEck, pinned the fault on an issue with Solana’s Berkeley packet filter that facilitates app upgrades and deployments.
The last time Solana endured a major outage, shutting down its transaction engine, was in February 2023. That similarly required coordinated validator reboots after identifying the specific error.
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Following the network issues, the price of SOL plunged from a 24-hour high of $98 to a low of $93.36. However, after the team restarted the network that was halted for 5 hours, the price has shown signs of recovery.
According to CoinGecko data, the price of SOL currently stands at $95.48, still struggling to reach the $100 level.
