The Solana blockchain is back online after its mainnet beta was shut down after suffering a denial-of-service disruption which caused its native token SOL to lose over 17%. However, it will still take several hours until full functionality.
What caused the network shutdown?
Yesterday, the Twitter account, Solana Status, an update account for the Solana blockchain, announced that Solana’s mainnet beta had been suffering intermittent instability over a 45-minute period. Few hours later, the account explained the reason for the instability in a tweet stating that it was a result of a large increase in transaction load to 400,000 per second which had overwhelmed the network and ultimately caused a denial-of-service.
The tweet stated, “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. This forking led to excessive memory consumption, causing some nods to go offline.”
The tweet also explained that Solana’s engineers were unable to stabilize the network and because of this, its validator community opted to coordinate a restart of the network. It stated, “Engineers across the ecosystem attempted to stabilize the network but were unsuccessful. The validator community elected to coordinate a restart of the network – the community is preparing a new release and instructions will be posted in discord.”
When this was announced, the native token SOL traded as low as $145 after the news broke from trading $175. This represents a 17.14% decline.
What is happening now?
The Solana Status Twitter account announced before the start of the London session that the validator community has successfully completed a restart of the Mainnet Beta after an upgrade indicating that the network is back online. The tweet stated, “The Solana validator community successfully completed a restart of Mainnet Beta after an upgrade to 1.6.25. DApps, block explorers and supporting systems will recover over the next several hours, at which point full functionality should be restored.”
As the tweet said, the network is back online but full functionality will not be expected until after several hours. The price of SOL seems to be recovering as it now currently stands at $165 per token, almost erasing all the losses made when the news broke.
