Solana Hit by Major Outage

Solana experienced its first major outage in a year, and markets initially responded by selling SOL, sending the token tumbling by 3.5%. Why was this event a testament to Solana’s resilience?

A patch to resolve the issue was live within an hour of the incident, coinciding with SOL’s local bottom, but the outage continued for another 4 hours, as 80% of Solana’s validators needed to come back online to reach the critical number of validators required for the network to resume.

Outages are highly undesirable. They not only compromise network liveness for users but also put sensitive DeFi protocols, like perpetual platforms and money markets, at risk of accruing bad debt by rendering them unable to conduct liquidations!

While an outage may not be an event that any blockchain wants to experience, it is simply unrealistic to expect developers to catch and mitigate every bug in their code, especially for a network like Solana that does not claim to be in its end state and remains in “beta.”

The most important things to see from Solana are the frequency of outages diminishing, which they have, and the efforts of a decentralized community to bounce back from one, demonstrated by the skepticism of validators to blindly implement a patch proposed by Solana Labs!

Undoubtedly, Solana has come a long way from its FTX days, and while no one wants to have their chain go down, today’s outage serves as a demonstration of the progress that the network has made during the months since the collapse.