- The Solana network has been successfully restarted and upgraded, and protocols are expected to fully recover in the next few hours.
- The Mainnet Beta went offline after facing a massive increase in transactions which caused it to fork.
The Mainnet Beta of Solana, one of the fast-growing blockchain networks, came to a halt yesterday for over 16 hours following a massive increase in transaction load on the network. This incident spurred a moment of concern for Solana users and communities, given the robust properties flaunted for the network. At the moment, however, the Solana network has been successfully upgraded and restarted.
The Solana team tweeted a few hours ago that the validator community was able to successfully restart the Mainnet Beta while launching a network upgrade to 1.6.12. The overall network, including decentralized applications (DApps), block explorers, and supporting systems, is expected to return to normalcy in a few hours.
What happened to the Solana network?
According to the team, transactions on the Solana Mainnet Beta spiked to 400,000 TPS on Tuesday, resulting in a massive load on the blockchain. This clogged the transaction processing queue and forced the network to start forking, given it lacked prioritization for network-critical messaging. Consequently, a lot of nodes on the Solana network were forced to go offline as the forking led to excessive memory consumption.
The validator community agreed to restart the network after unsuccessful attempts to stabilize the network at the time. The network has been restarted, and all related protocols will recover over the next hours.
The price of the Solana cryptocurrency plummeted following the incident yesterday. SOL dropped by over 14 percent, from $168.33 to $144.15 within the last 24 hours, which was mostly driven by the network outage news. At the time of writing, SOL was trading at $160.17 on CoinMarketCap, with a market capitalization of over $47 billion.
It seems there was an overall increase in activities on the crypto market on Tuesday, as one of the popular Ethereum layer two solutions, Arbitrum also reported an outage on the same day as Solana.
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