The Solana network encountered a significant disruption

The Solana network encountered a significant disruption on Feb. 6 at 10:22 UTC, prompting engineers from various sectors to address the issue on the mainnet beta. Block production on the Solana mainnet is currently paused, and engineers, along with validators, are actively investigating the cause of the outage.

The Solana blockchain explorer indicated the downtime with a “major outage” alert on the mainnet. Observant users on social media noticed that Solana had not produced a block for over 25 minutes, significantly longer than its typical block production time of 400 milliseconds. Solana validator Stakewiz reported that developers are working on a fix, with plans to release further instructions to validators once the fix is built and tested.

Meanwhile, validators are creating snapshots using their local ledger state in preparation for a restart, as core engineers finalize the release. Validators are currently generating snapshots for slot 246464040 to ensure consistency in the bank hash at this slot. Restarting the Mainnet-Beta cluster with version 1.17.20 is planned, with a jito-solana release also available. No inconsistencies in state have been detected, and validators are awaiting confirmation from core engineers to proceed.

Snapshots provide a snapshot of the Solana state at a specific slot, with the latest optimistically confirmed slot serving as a reference point for validators to prevent transaction rollbacks. Solana has released version v1.17.20 and urged validators to upgrade and restart following the provided GitHub instructions.

The Solana network outage has affected crypto exchanges, with Upbit announcing the suspension of deposits and withdrawals for Solana-based tokens such as Solana’s, GMT, Raydium, and Access Protocol’s. This isn’t the first time Solana has experienced network disruptions or block production downtime.

Since its launch in March 2020, the network has encountered multiple outages, with this being the eleventh in two years. Despite its promise of scalable solutions for decentralized ecosystems, Solana has faced ongoing network challenges, necessitating numerous restarts.