Solana restarted after seven-hour outage caused by surge of transactions

Validator operators of Solana, a proof-of-stake blockchain, successfully completed a cluster restart at about 11 p.m. ET on Saturday following a roughly seven-hour outage when the network failed to reach consensus, it said on Twitter.

An earlier Twitter post had said that “Solana Mainnet Beta lost consensus after an enormous amount of inbound transactions (4m per second) flooded the network, surpassing 100gbps.”

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Finally, late Saturday night, one of the validators coordinating through the Solana discord sent a Google doc of instructions that enabled the operators to restart the cluster at slot 131973970.

Engineers were still investigating why the network was unable to recover from the crush of transactions that caused the outage, the Twitter post said.

Last September, Solana went offline after it was overwhelmed by hundreds of thousands of transactions per second and remained down for 17 hours.

About Author

Mike Millard has worked as an editor for Bloomberg and Reuters, various newspapers and websites. He lived in Asia for more than two decades and now calls the Greek island of Corfu home. He is the author of three books.