The Solana network has suffered yet another network outage in 2022 making it five out of at least seven times in the last 12 months.
Block production on the Solana blockchain was paused at 16:55 UTC on Wednesday due to a glitch. According to the incident report, the latest outage lasted almost four and a half hours before validator operators were able to resume the mainnet at around 21:00 UTC.
Anatoly Yakovenko, the co-founder of Solana Labs, revealed what happened in a tweet:
“Durable nonce instruction caused part of the network to consider the block is invalid, no consensus could be formed.”
According to the official Solana literature, “durable transaction nonce” refers to a method that addresses the normal short lifetime of a transaction block hash.
The recent period of the outage was triggered by a flaw in the functionality, which led nodes to provide different outputs, resulting in consensus failure.
The network was restarted with this function turned off, and Yakovenko promised that the bug will be fixed “as soon as possible.” Naturally, the community reacted negatively, with comments like this flooding the site’s feed:
“Get it together Solana. We should be past this already. I’m big believer but I’m even doubting at this point.”
Ran Neuner, a CNBC crypto trader and the CEO of Onchain Capital, simply said:
According to CoinGecko, SOL prices have plummeted about 14 percent in the last 12 hours, falling below $40. The network’s native token has dropped 85% from its all-time high of $260 in November 2021, and it is on the verge of falling out of the top ten by market value.
According to the network uptime tracker, Solana, which has been branded an “Ethereum killer,” has been entirely or partially offline at least seven times since September 2021, when it suffered a denial of service attack-related outages twice in the same month.
In January, the blockchain was beset by issues, with service interruptions and reduced performance for nine of the month’s 31 days.
The second outage in January was attributed to duplicate transactions. Solana was down for about eight hours in late April and early May owing to nonfungible token minting bots overwhelming the network.
Furthermore, Solana’s blockchain clock is sluggish, running 30 minutes behind real-time. “On-chain time continues to lag behind that of wall clocks, due to longer-than-normal block durations,” according to the status page.
