After reaching a record-breaking high of four million transactions per second, the Solana network suffered a seven-hour outage overnight Saturday – Sunday. The 100 gigabits of data per second congested the network. It caused validators to be knocked out of consensus resulting in the outage. This resulted in SOL’s price drop by nearly 7% to $84. But it has since recovered and is trading at $89.
Metaplex tweeted that the Solana mainnet-beta went down partially due to botting on the Metaplex Candy Machine program. It said they have merged and will deploy a botting penalty to the program as part of a broader effort to stabilize the network. Metaplex highlighted that it would implement a 0.01 Solana (SOL) charge on wallets that want to complete an invalid transaction. The firm said this is typically done by bots that are blindly trying to mint.
The latest outage is a “big seven” for the network. Sources pointed out that between January 6 – 12, the Solana network was plagued with issues causing partial blackouts for between 8 to 18 hours. Solana attributed the outages to high compute transactions. It caused a reduction in network capacity to several thousand transactions per second. This is much lower than the touted 50,000 TPS. Over 29 hours of downtime was recorded between January 21 and 22nd. Excessive duplicate transactions prompted network congestion and outages on the blockchain.
