- Solana has blamed the 17-hour outage that temporarily halted its network on a flood of transactions
- Bots flooded the blockchain with requests during a Raydium IDO, knocking it offline
- The blockchain was restarted and is now back online
Solana has blamed the 17-hour outage it experienced yesterday on a “large increase in transaction load” which caused the network to start forking. The blockchain experienced 400,000 transactions at its peak, which led to “excessive memory consumption” and some nodes going offline, leaving developers no choice but to shut the network down. It has since restarted, although clusters are still experiencing problems.
1/ Solana Mainnet Beta encountered a large increase in transaction load which peaked at 400,000 TPS. These transactions flooded the transaction processing queue, and lack of prioritization of network-critical messaging caused the network to start forking.
— Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) September 14, 2021
Raydium IDO Bots Caused Transaction Flood
Solana’s problems began yesterday afternoon when it experienced “intermittent instability” on the network caused by “resource exhaustion”, which brought blockchain validation to an hours-long halt. All activity on the Solana ecosystem ceased as developers worked out how to tackle the problem, which was eventually traced back to bots flooding the network during a Raydium IDO:
Bots during a raydium ido are flooding the network at 300k txs per second. The queues that forwards txs to block producers grew in size to a point that caused excessive forking. The fix to prioritize messages in this queue was already in the works but wasn’t out yet.
— Anatoly Yakovenko (@aeyakovenko) September 14, 2021
Developers attempted to stem the flood of transactions but were unsuccessful, leading to instructions being sent to node operators on how to restart their systems and get the blockchain back online. Solana informed the community this morning that the restart was successful, with the blockchain expected to be back in full operational mode within hours.
Solana Price Dumps After Recent Rally
This is the second time that the Solana mainnet, which is still in Beta mode, has been knocked offline by a flood of transactions – a similar event took place in December. Having spiked from $35 to $215 in the space of six weeks, the Solana price was always expected to retrace, but this outage has helped the value fall perhaps further than anticipated, dropping to $142 overnight before rallying on news of the fix.
