Bug Brings Down Solana Blockchain for Four Hours

Blockchain platform Solana was down this afternoon for over four hours due to a bug that stopped blockchain production. The official Solana Status page and Twitter account reported the issue just before 1 p.m. ET today, with validators bringing the network back online via a restart around 5 p.m.

According to information from Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko and other developers on Twitter, the issue was due to a bug with the durable nonce feature of the blockchain. Yakovenko tweeted that the issue “caused part of the network to consider the block is invalid,” and that “no consensus could be formed” as a result.

Validators worked together to restart the Solana network with the durable nonce feature disabled, and Yakovenko added that the bug will be fixed in a future update. All told, the Solana Status page reports that the network was down for 4 hours and 10 minutes. As of this writing, some Solana RPC nodes are still coming back online.

Solana is a rising competitor to Ethereum that has become a popular platform for NFT collectibles, decentralized apps (dapps) and games, and decentralized finance (DeFi) services.

The network’s SOL cryptocurrency saw a meteoric rise in value last fall, but has cooled in recent months alongside much of the rest of the crypto market. Currently, Solana is down 11% over the past 24 hours to a price just above $40, per data from CoinMarketCap—down 84% from last November’s peak of $260.

Solana has experienced two high-profile periods of downtime over the past several months. Last September, the network was down for nearly 18 hours after being overwhelmed by transactions being sent to a DeFi protocol for a new token launch. Solana Labs described it as a “denial of service attack” in a postmortem report.

More recently, on April 30, the network crashed after NFT minting bots—automated programs designed to game the launch of a new NFT project—overwhelmed Solana with a reported 6 million transactions per second. Metaplex, the makers of Solana’s NFT protocol, have implemented a “bot tax” penalty to try and avoid that issue going forward.