An incorrectly configured node caused the Solana network to shut down completely from Friday evening to Saturday morning. At the time of writing, the network has been up and running for just under half an hour, but it’s not really a good thing for Solana.
What does this mean for Solana?
If Solana wants to prove itself as the best decentralized platform for DeFi applications, it can’t afford this kind of misery. The downtime of the past few hours already marked the fourth major outage for the project since January. It is therefore no surprise that Solana is suffering extra from the crypto winter and has already lost 81 percent of its price value in 2022. At this level, when billions are at stake, your blockchain cannot stop for a few hours.
As an investor, it is important that you can move your assets at all times. In the case of Solana, you just have to hope that the blockchain is running the moment you want to buy or sell. In that sense, Solana really has to prove itself in terms of reliability and run without problems for a few years before it can even call itself a potential ‘Ethereum killer’.
What happened?
At this point, it is not yet fully clear what happened. What we do know is that on September 30, large groups of validators suddenly stopped voting for new blocks. Then panic immediately broke out in the community, mainly because it was not clear exactly where the problem lay. At first, it was not even clear whether the network had come to a complete standstill or not.
In the end it turned out that one validator produced two blocks due to a wrong configuration. However, the majority of the network got stuck in the non-valid block that this validator produced. For example, most of it was stuck in a non-valid fork of the Solana blockchain. Because of that, the network had to go through a major reset, then continue from the first block before the problem occurred.
