A blockchain network such as Bitcoin (BTC) should be accessible as much as possible. That is one of the strengths that blockchain technology offers. However, it is also a point that the crypto network Solana (SOL) often seems to have trouble with. Likewise last night. The Solana network was once again at a standstill.
Solana not reachable due to error
Last night was on the status page from Solana that the network suffered from “decreased performance.” Not much later, an update appeared on Twitter that the network was really completely off the air:
“The Solana network is experiencing an outage and is not processing transactions. Developers across the ecosystem are working to diagnose the issue and reboot the network.”
The Solana network is experiencing an outage and not processing transactions. Developers across the ecosystem are working on diagnosing the issue and to restart the network. More information will be provided as it becomes available.
— Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) Oct 1, 2022
The failure turned out to be the result of an error at one of the nodes within the network. “It appears that a misconfigured node has caused an unrecoverable partition on the network,” lays Laine from stakewiz.com. Then this person clarified this to Decrypt with the next one:
“A validator ran a duplicate validator instance. This means that when it was their turn to produce a transaction block, they made one from each instance, for the same slot, so some validators saw one block, others the others, and then couldn’t agree on which block was correct used to be.”
All in all, Solana was off the air for 2 hours and 45 minutes due to the issues.
Solana suffers from malfunctions more often
As mentioned, this was not the first time that Solana had to deal with outages. In January, the network went off the air several times, once the network was unavailable for 7 hours. In September before, there was already an 18-hour outage. It is the fourth major outage since January this year.
Nevertheless, there was also positive crypto news for Solana. Recently, the network reached the important milestone of 100 billion processed transactions.