Key takeaways:
- Over the weekend, an abnormality caused almost half of Cardano’s nodes to disconnect and restart; the underlying cause is currently being looked into.
- The vast majority of nodes automatically recovered depending on the specified SPO.
According to developers, the Cardano network briefly went down on Sunday. However, it was automatically rectified, and as of the time of writing, no single root cause was uncovered.
According to a message sent on the Telegram SPO on January 22, an anomaly forced 50% of Cardano nodes to detach and restart. The financial engineering and research team behind the Cardano blockchain is called Input Output Global. The telegram message indicates:
“This appears to have been triggered by a transient anomaly causing two reactions in the node, some disconnected from a peer, others threw an exception and restarted,”
The Cardano network temporarily declined, but it quickly rebounded on its own. As mentioned in the post, the consensus and node architecture considered these transient issues, and the systems performed as expected.
Block production allegedly continued throughout the anomaly, which occurred between blocks 8300569 and 8300570, but was temporarily slowed. According to reports, the impact was minimal and was comparable to delays experienced during routine operations.
Depending on the selected SPO, the majority of nodes automatically recover. The cause of the anomaly that led to the node disconnections and restarts is still being looked into as of the time of writing.
Node failure can occur for various reasons, such as an excess of transactional activity or lousy code. A speedy remedy, however, might signify solid fundamentals for the impacted network. The quick recovery is praised by the Cardano community, who sees it as evidence that their blockchain is better than Solana, which took hours to restore the network following several breakdowns in 2022. SundaeSwap, a decentralized exchange powered by Cardano, and its chief technical officer, Pi Lanningham, tweeted:
“The real takeaway for me is how impressively resilient the cardano network is. Something took down ~60% of nodes and the network recovered in a few minutes, and continued producing blocks throughout,”
Tom Stokes, a Cardano SPO and co-founder of Node Shark, wrote on the alleged impact on over half of the listed nodes in a post on January 22. He also provided a graph that showed the network sync for more than 300 reporting nodes dropping from 100% to just about 40%.
According to Stokes chart, the network sync bounced back to about 87% following the decrease, but it took some time before it reached its previous level of 100%.