Only 5 months have passed since the year 2022 began. Yet, Solana is already experiencing an outage for the fifth time. But on this instance, the reason was consensus failure due to a bug. Interestingly enough, in the past 12 months Solana has undergone 7 (partial or full) outages in total.
What Caused the Bug?
The culprit in the latest Solana outage was a bug. It sent Solana’s Blockchain network off the internet. This led to the halting of the block production on Wednesday at 16:55 UTC. The recent outage managed to last about four and a half hours. Eventually, the validator operators restarted the mainnet. This occurred at about 21:00 UTC.
The co-founder of Solana Labs, Anatoly Yakovenko, commented that the Blockchain failed to form a consensus. This happened due to Durable Nonce Instruction which made the network think the block was invalid.
As per the official documentation by Solana, a Durable Nonce Instruction refers to a very particular mechanism. This mechanism pertains to the generally short lifespan of a block transaction hash.
Why did SOL go Offline?
When hit by the nasty bug, the nodes were prompted to create different outputs. This lead to a failure in consensus, which triggered the 4 hours downtime and caused an outrage among traders.
To restart the network, Solana had to turn off the Durable Nonce Instruction feature and hope for the best. The team at Solana Labs is still looking for a solution to the bug problem. Many community members criticized Solana for going offline.
The prices of SOL have declined by almost 14 per cent.
