Solana’s developers are working hard to prevent any further disruptions to the network. It has already fixed several bugs, including the runtime bug that caused the latest failure.
Bug in nonce transaction function
The last and fifth outages on the Solana network are reportedly caused by a bug in the “durable nonce transaction function.” This is according to a report from Solana herself. The network was shut down for approximately 4.5 hours, after which it was successfully restarted. The relevant function has been (temporarily) disabled to prevent the same situation from occurring again.
The term durable nonce transactions refers to a type of transaction on the Solana network that is designed not to expire, unlike a normal transaction on the network which usually has a short lifespan of about 2 minutes before a block hash becomes too old to to be validated.
Feature intended for transactions that require more time
This feature is almost always used for road-bound transactions such as custodial services that, according to the ‘Solana Documentation’, take longer than usual to create a signature for the transaction.
However, these transactions require a separate mechanism to avoid duplicate transactions and to be processed properly. However, a runtime bug in this case caused that after such a nonce transaction was processed as a normal transaction and failed, but resubmitted, the network came to a standstill. Removing the feature (temporarily) completely removes the chance that the same bug will reoccur.