Solana Survives Five-Hour Network Outage, Will Users Come Back?

Solana recovers from a five-hour outage through a successful upgrade.
VanEck’s Matthew Sigel attributes Solana downtime to BPF loader failure.
Despite outages, Solana sees value surge post-FTX founder’s departure.

Solana, a prominent blockchain network, recently faced a five-hour outage, marking its fifth-longest downtime in history. The disruption commenced around 09:53 UTC, impacting Solana’s native token, SOL, causing a more than 3% price drop. However, the network is now back online following a successful upgrade and restart orchestrated by validator operators.

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This outage is the eleventh in the past two years for Solana, but despite these occasional interruptions, the network has demonstrated resilience. During the downtime, the engineering team swiftly addressed the issue by releasing a new validator software patch.

The head of digital asset research at VanEck, Matthew Sigel, shed light on the cause of the outage, attributing it to a failure in the Berkley Packet Filter (BPF) loader. The BPF loader plays a crucial role in deploying, upgrading, and executing programs on the Solana network.

Sigel suggested that this failure might be linked to a prior SMID proposal, introducing an interceptor to prevent metadata usage in BPF. Notably, this metadata had become obsolete, leading to complications with the 0093 upgrade, resulting in an error.

The testing phase for the fix was already in progress when the error occurred on the live network. While a resolution was available, it had not been implemented for testing reasons. Some speculate that the error might have been manually triggered, leading to the temporary crash of the Solana network.

Despite these technical challenges, Solana has seen a surge in value. Notably, the network has garnered attention following the departure of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, a significant supporter of the Solana ecosystem. The incident underscores the complexities and continuous improvements required in blockchain networks to ensure robustness and reliability.

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Lauren Cole

A focused and vigilant storyteller for all things blockchain and cryptocurrency. Besides consuming every piece of literature about the metaverse, she can often be found at industry convections looking for the latest scoop.