Saturday morning Solana camped (SOL) suddenly with a major disturbance. An accidental fork caused the network to suddenly start producing several transaction histories. A workaround has been found, but the Solana Foundation still doesn’t know exactly what the problem was.
Solana’s cause of problems not clear
The Solana Foundation wrote that in a Monday blog article. What is clear is that validators suddenly switched to the ‘vote-only mode’, which is a kind of safety mode, due to drastic performance loss. This helps restore the network after the network has been down. Transactions were not processed during this period.
The network would have been in this mode for about 20 hours. The network was operational again on Sunday night, but that does not mean that the problems were completely gone. Often the transaction speed dropped to only a few hundred or even a few tens of transactions per second (TPS).
The Solana Foundation recommended that validators run older validator software until the problem is resolved. The organization did confirm that old transactions that were already confirmed before the problems have remained unaffected.
The workaround required validators with a total of 80% of SOL tokens in staking contracts to move to the older software version. There are a number of large crypto exchanges that run nodes. These parties appear to have a lot of SOL, so their switch will have helped a lot.
A lot of criticism of Solana
Solana was one of the most popular cryptocurrencies in the recent bull market, but the project has recently come under a lot of criticism. Blockchain head of accounting firm Ernst & Young (EY) named the network last Sunday a failure on Twitter. “How can you make mission-critical infrastructure on this nonsense?” he asked his followers.
“Solana is a kind of lifestyle-friendly blockchain because you can take weekends and evenings off,” he explained in a second tweet.
Solana is like a lifestyle-friendly blockchain because you can have nights and weekends off.
— Paul Brody prbrody.eth 🦇🔊 (@pbrody) February 26, 2023
In any case, Solana is not the only network to have software problems. For example, last year several crypto exchanges were unavailable due to a major malfunction at cloud service provider Cloudflare.