Solana was down for about 17 hours, with the problem beginning at 9 a.m. (BRT) on September 14. The network had to be booted after having problems validating transactions, according to the Twitter account managed by the Solana project.
What happened to the Solana network?
At the time, Solana reported via its Twitter account, that the problem had occurred after an overload. This would have caused what is known as a denial of service (DoS). At the same time, the network was restarted by the Solana validator community.
Solana mainnet-beta is experiencing intermittent instability. This began approximately 45 minutes ago, and engineers are investigating the issue.
— Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) September 14, 2021
A week later, Solana blockchain developers have released an analysis of the outage that occurred on the network last week. According to the protocol’s developer team, the network received about 400,000 transactions per second, which led to the instability and overload that took the network down to the excess of transactions generated by robots trying to participate in the initial offering.
The transactions overloaded the Solana distributed nodes, which led to increased memory utilization, leading to a crash, causing the network to stop producing blocks. The network validators chose to upgrade and reboot the network by hard fork from the last confirmed block to solve the problem.
The entry of new users caused overload
According to Mercurius Crypto analyst Orlando Telles, the problem was caused by an IDO conducted by Raydium. As a result, there was a large influx of new users on the network and bots, which caused a widespread overload, leading to the need for a reboot.
“Basically, the network was down due to excessive transactions. While the white papers claim that the network supports a certain number of transactions, only with real-life stress tests can we say whether the network supports that volume”, he said.
The Solana network promises to handle 40 thousand transactions per second, but yesterday’s move ended up showing bottlenecks in the validation process.
The problems detected on September 14 have caused severe consequences for applications built using the Solana protocol, leading to network connection problems. This includes Pyth, one of the most widely used applications, which feeds price data to the DeFi projects on stocks, cryptocurrencies, and other assets.
Problems impacted the price of the Solana token
The network instability impacted the price of the Solana token, which had been snowballing. On the date of the problem, the value of the cryptoasset fell by about 15 percent, trading at US$ 145.15, a value that remained the same in the following days (as of the date this article on September 22).
However, in the previous 40 days, the SOL price more than doubled, peaking at US$ 211, according to CoinGecko.com. As a result, Solana reached more than 30,000% appreciation, starting at 50 cents in May 2020. The total market value of the protocol is about US$ 48 billion, positioned as the seventh-largest cryptoasset.
