Key Takeaways
- The slowdown forced the platform to restart the network on v1.13.6, hoping to restore transactions in the network.
- .During the upgrade, the blockchain entered a “vote-only” mode, resulting in a full restart of the network.
On February 25, Solana Network faced a slowdown in block production resulting in transaction disruptions. The tech issues not only caused the freezing of nearly all on-chain activity on the Solana network but also forced the platform to restart the network on v1.13.6, hoping to restore transactions in the network.
During the upgrade, the blockchain entered a “vote-only” mode, which usually allows for swift problem resolution, but the blockchain was unable to recover this time. This eventually resulted in a full restart of the network.
“The network experienced a significant slowdown in block production that coincided with an upgrade to validator software. Engineers are still conducting a root cause analysis,” Solana’s official statement reads.
Even though the culprit is yet to be identified, many validator operators suspect a bug in the new version of Solana code that had come online hours before as the root cause for the slowdown. The currently restarting network requires 80% of active stake online to resume operations.
“As more validators complete their restart, this number will rise in line with the amount of stake they have delegated: this means larger validators such as CEX have an outsized impact on restart times.”
The network is now engaged in a second restarting attempt, as the first attempt was abandoned when network validators realized they picked the wrong point at which to restart, further lengthening the delay. Last October, the blockchain underwent a similar restart process after a glitch caused a prolonged outage.
This is, however, not the first time the Solana Network is facing slowdown issues. In Early January 2022, Solana’s blockchain suffered distributed denial-of-service attack(DDoS) causing the network to go offline for around 4 hours.
The Solana Status had also reported that the network suffered intermittent instability over 45 minutes in September 2021. The blockchain has faced several problems with congestion owing to the release of specific projects that have also crowded the network, as occurred on December 2021 when the launch of a project called Solchicks affected the stability of the blockchain.
Last year, the platform acknowledged the technical issues plaguing it by reasoning that the degraded performance is due to an increase in high compute transactions, which is reducing network capacity to several thousand transactions per second.
