The Solana network has been offline for almost 11 hours and that has not done the SOL price any good. All problems now seem solved, but what exactly happened?
Solana’s problems cause a price drop
The network has stopped producing blocks for hours. Solana Labs and validators teamed up to reboot the network. This allowed the network to resume validating transactions.
According to the Solana Twitter account, Solana’s outage is due to a deluge of transactions sent by bots, at a staggering 400,000 transactions per second. The network couldn’t handle that and the memory of some nodes overflowed and caused them to shut down.
1/ Solana Mainnet Beta encountered a large increase in transaction load which peaked at 400,000 TPS. These transactions flooded the transaction processing queue, and lack of prioritization of network-critical messaging caused the network to start forking.
— Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) September 14, 2021
Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko tweeted that the deluge of transactions was being sent to the Solana-based DeFi protocol Raydium.
The network outage and ensuing price action mark an unexpected stop to Solana’s recent upward momentum. The SOL price reached an ATH of USD 216 on September 9, but has fallen to a low of USD 140 last night due to the problems.
The restart of the Solana network
Fortunately, we can report this morning that developers have managed to fix the issues that have brought the network back online. Solana also said that the Dapps, block explorers and support system will be back online within hours and full functionality will be restored.