Solana Developers Say Reason for Network Outage Still Unclear

Solana developers said Monday the reason for a network-wide outage over the weekend was still unclear but investigations are ongoing.

“At approximately 05:46:16 UTC 2023-02-25, Solana Mainnet Beta suffered a significant performance degradation,” the developers said. “Eventually leading the validator community to opt for a restart of the network. The cause of this is still unknown and under active investigation.”

“Root cause is still unknown and under active investigation,” developers added.

The problems that started as sluggish transaction processing spiraled into a near complete shutdown of activity on Solana, validators and developers told CoinDesk over the weekend.

Users were unable to move any tokens or conduct any transactions during the outage period until a restart by the network’s validators, at which point transactions resumed, albeit very slowly.

Market reaction to the halt remained relatively timid. Solana’s native tokens (SOL) fell from $23.50 to just over $21 on Saturday night before erasing all losses from Sunday to Monday.

Meanwhile, Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko dismissed theories of increased network voting as a major cause behind the network outage in tweets on Monday evening.

“Votes aren't just counted as transactions, they are literally implemented as transactions because there is no cheaper way to do it,” Yakovenko said. “If there was a cheaper way to get votes to all the nodes in the network, then why wouldn't user transactions also take the cheaper path?”

Read more: Solana Validators to Make Second Restart Attempt as Transaction Freeze Drags On