The Solana network had a large failure on February 6 at 10:22 UTC, and engineers from throughout the ecosystem are investigating the issue on the mainnet beta. The Solana mainnet has block production issues, and block progression is now stalled. Core engineers and validators are actively investigating. The Solana blockchain explorer confirmed the unavailability by displaying a “major outage” on the mainnet.
Social media users began to observe that, in contrast to the Solana blockchain’s typical block generation period of 400 milliseconds, the blockchain had not produced a block in more than 25 minutes.
Developers are producing an update with a remedy right now, as reported by Stakewiz. Validators will receive additional instructions after it has built and tested. As core engineers work on the release, Stakewiz also mentioned that validators had “begun generating snapshots using their local ledger state to prepare for a restart.”
Validators are creating the snapshots for slot 246464040 and ensuring the bank hash for this position is consistent. they will use version 1.17.20 to restart the Mainnet-Beta cluster; a Jito-Solana release is also accessible. Validators are waiting for core engineers’ final approval before moving on because no discrepancies in the state have discovered.
Solana’s Struggle with Network Stability
A snapshot represents the global Solana state at a certain moment in time. The most recent slot that all validators have processed is the final one that has tentatively confirmed. It is not finished even though a supermajority has confirmed it; the validators use this slot to ensure no transactions are rolled back.
Additionally, Solana issued version 1.17.20 and instructed validators to update and relaunch using the given GitHub instructions.
Crypto exchanges are already feeling the effects of the Solana network outage. Upbit has announced that it would stop accepting deposits and withdrawals of tokens that are based on the Solana network, including GMT (GMT), Raydium (RAY), Access Protocol (ACS), and Solana itself.
The Solana blockchain has experienced network failures and block production pauses before. Since its inception, the network has seen numerous outages; this one will be the twelfth in the past two years.
Launched in March 2020, the Solana blockchain aims to provide scalable solutions for a decentralized environment that may match Ethereum with lower transaction fees and faster transaction processing times. The network’s popularity increased in 2021 during the past bull cycle due to rising adoption rates and token prices. Developers have had to restart the network due to persistent network-related issues repeatedly.