While Ethereum users participating in the Otherside metaverse land sale caused network fees to rise and created issues for the blockchain explorer Etherscan, it overshadowed Solana’s blockchain network outage. It seems a flood of inbound transactions on Saturday caused Solana’s mainnet to lose consensus for roughly seven hours.
Solana’s Mainnet Loses Consensus for 7 Hours
- The Solana proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain network suffered another outage after a significant amount of transactions flooded the network. Solana’s PoS network has had difficulties in the past, as block production stalled for hours in mid-September 2021.
- Solana’s network outage was confirmed on Twitter. “Block production on Solana Mainnet Beta has halted. Validator operators should prepare for a restart in mb-validators on Discord,” the Twitter account called Solana Status said. “Validator operators across the ecosystem are working to finalize restart instructions for Mainnet Beta.”
- The outage on Saturday follows the statements made by one of the project’s co-founders, Anatoly Yakovenko, who said Bitcoin’s consensus algorithm should change to PoS. “If [Bitcoin] eventually doesn’t switch to proof-of-stake nobody is going to use it,” the Solana co-founder explained in an interview.
- During the outage, Yakovenko’s recent Bitcoin PoS commentary was mocked and one individual wrote: “Eventually if Solana doesn’t have consistent uptime, nobody is going to use it.”
- After seven hours, Solana Status updated the public about the downtime and a network restart. “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,” the Twitter account wrote. “Network operators and dapps will continue to restore client services over the next several hours.”
- Solana’s development team had to issue cluster restart instructions and published a document about how to start the process. During the first week of January 2022, Solana’s development team formally acknowledged that “high compute transactions” were “reducing network capacity.”
- While Solana has had issues with a flood of transactions and long-lasting outages, since January 3, 2009, Bitcoin (BTC) has a network uptime percentage rating of around 99.98734244113%.
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