Solana (SOL): No official explanation yet for 20 hours of network downtime

Originally posted here.
By: Stephan Fiedler

Overview

At Solana (SOL), the network was down for almost 20 hours over the weekend and only a coordinated restart provided a remedy. Even in retrospect, […]

The Post

At Solana (SOL), the network was down for almost 20 hours over the weekend and only a coordinated restart provided a remedy. Even in retrospect, the developers are still puzzling over the cause of the blackout.

Solana (SOL) has earned a dubious reputation among leading altcoins for being the ecosystem with the most frequent network problems. In the past year alone, Solana’s ecosystem has seen SOL’s blockchain experience significant issues eight times, forcing it to shut down for hours, not least for security reasons. But the latest incident, which without any warning shut down Solana for nearly 20 hours from Saturday to Sunday, has components that must make even hardcore fans of SOL wonder.

Even in retrospect, the Solana team has to admit in an error report that they have not yet been able to clearly pinpoint the reason for the blackout. They promise to provide information as soon as it is known – but as of Wednesday morning, three days after the complete Solana failure, the developers do not dare to provide a detailed diagnosis.

Therefore, the only thing that is known beyond doubt is that initially slow processing of transactions in the SOL blockchain caused concern and the network therefore suspended the processing of money orders as a precaution. Then, when neither the network points nor Solana’s developers were able to isolate the problem in a timely manner, the decision was made internally to attempt a reboot. Such a plan generally lacks sovereignty because it usually requires the approval of a huge majority of the network points; in Solana’s case, the quorum is 80 percent. After all, targeted intervention in the blockchain is pretty much the opposite of what the decentralized and independent principle of blockchains promises.

In the case of Solana, two further details were added during the agonizingly long network outage this time, which made some people wonder. An initial restart was called off again at short notice. The go-ahead was not given until it was decided to rely on an older version of the software for network points and also to reset the point for resuming operations further back than from where the Solana outages began. While this approach is documented by the Solana team, it is also not explained in any detail. In the past, Solana had certainly received recognition for its transparent bug reports, explaining the network’s emergency stops mostly by overload. However, there were no signs of peak loads at SOL over the weekend.

Conclusion: Solana Blockchain a candidate for major overhaul

After each of Solana’s network outages, the official word is that they will work to prevent them from happening again. However, given that SOL still has an $8.5 billion market cap and many hundreds of millions of dollars of capital actively involved in Solana’s ecosystem in deals such as DeFi, NFTs, and blockchain gaming, these announcements only come as a consolation. On a sober note, Solana seems to have simply been lucky so far that the black-outs were not induced or exploited by hackers as far as is known. This leads to the conclusion that Solana should consider fundamentally reforming the architecture of his blockchain.