Solana blockchain was down for most of the afternoon due to a bug. Validators managed to bring the network back online through a restart. According to the Solana Status page, the network was down for four hours and 10 minutes.
Anatoly Yakovenko, the co-founder of Solana, tweeted that the issue was due to a bug with the durable nonce feature of the blockchain. It caused part of the network to consider the block invalid and that no consensus could be formed. The Solana blockchain network’s team worked together to resolve the issue. The durable nonce feature was disabled.
Yakovenko highlighted that the bug would be fixed in a future update. Solana’s team, in a blog post, said a bug in the durable nonce transactions feature led to nondeterminism when nodes generated different results for the same block. This prevented the network from advancing. Laine, Solana validator, tweeted that the issue is not connected to clock drift and the clock drift has nothing to do with the network halting. Crypto enthusiast Richard Patel tweeted that Solana’s halt suggests that the durable nonces feature contains a DoS vulnerability that has caused nodes to disagree, breaking consensus.
Solana blockchain is regarded as a swift competitor for Ethereum – or “Ethereum killer”. It has become a popular platform for NFT collectibles, decentralized apps, games, and DeFi services. However, the Solana network has also seen multiple outages over the last few months – bringing to fore its reliability.
