Solana Price Plunges as Blockchain Suffers Outage Again

Solana’s price has taken a hit amid another major outage that has grinded the network activity to a halt.

Crypto pundit and host of NFT Alpha show, Nick Valdez first brought the development to public attention on Twitter after a series of speculative mentions. A few hours later, the official Solana Twitter handle confirmed the report in the early hours of Saturday.

According to the handle, the network experienced an outage and transactions were no longer being processed. The Solana team assured the community that network developers were already up and about, looking to resolve the issue. 

This incident marks the fourth time Solana is experiencing a major outage this year. The network is now renowned within the crypto community for its occasional blackouts, as several proponents have cited the pattern as a reason to steer clear of the chain.

Following confirmation of the outage, Solana shared a document with instructions to validators on steps to take in order to assist in solving the issue. The network has been successfully restarted as of press time, and fully operational. 

Despite the resolution, the network’s outage lasted for over 8 hours. Solana’s price has, in tandem with the majority of the markets, seen a dip within this timeframe. While it might be a reach to ascribe Solana’s current price situation to the recent outage, the asset has in the past undoubtedly suffered from a network blackout.

Solana is currently trading at $32.98 as of press time, down 3.43% in the past 24 hours. Since its fall from the lofty position of $47.9 on August 13, the asset has been caught in a bearish pattern. The asset saw a free fall from August 13 to August 19 which brought it below the $40-mark. Solana has not revisited the zone at $40 since then.

What Caused Solana’s Recent Outage?

Limited information has surfaced on the root cause of the issue. Laine Stakewiz, a blockchain company running Solana nodes, recently shared insight on the matter.

Several Solana validators stopped voting around 22:40 (UTC) on Friday. Operators received alerts of the issue and congregated on Discord to discuss it and find a solution. The network appeared to have been stuck as it was confirmed that new roots were not being produced.

According to Laine Stakewiz, it was noticed that a validator shared an invalid block. The incident on its own oughtn’t result in a major issue, as it could be resolved by the network. Notwithstanding, the validator seemed to have been on two “instances,” with both producing an invalid block. The act led to the creation of a fork.

The fork, in turn, resulted in an abstruse code path with validators stuck on it. Attempts to switch to the main Solana fork proved futile, leading to a halt in network activity. Upon discovering the core issue, developers noted that a cluster restart was required to resolve the outage.