With at least seven full or partial outages in the past 12 months, the Solana network is not having a good year.
At 16:55 UTC on Wednesday, the Solana blockchain was taken offline once again due to a problem. According to the incident report, the most recent disruption went on for almost four and a half hours before validator operators were able to get the mainnet back online at around 21:00 UTC.
According to the official Solana literature, a “durable transaction nonce” is a method designed to deal with the often limited lifetime of a transaction block hash. The most recent outage was caused by a bug in the system that let nodes make different outputs, which made it impossible to reach a consensus.
CoinGecko says that the price of SOL has taken a big hit, falling about 14% in the last 12 hours to a low of below $40. The native token of the network has dropped 85% from its all-time high of $260 in November 2021 and is about to drop out of the top 10 by market value.
The network uptime tracker shows that Solana, sometimes called an “Ethereum killer,” has been completely or partially down at least seven times since September 2021, including twice in the same month due to denial of service attacks.
The second disruption in January happened because of double transactions. Nonfungible token minting bots again brought the Solana network down for over eight hours in late April and early May.
To add insult to injury, Solana’s blockchain timer is 30 minutes behind the actual time. Longer-than-usual block delays are causing “on-chain time” to lag behind “wall clock” time, the status page says.
