The outage has derailed the dramatic bull run that SOL had embarked on.
The Solana mainnet is back online — almost 20 hours after suffering a high-profile outage.
“Resource exhaustion” in the network was blamed for the disruption, which caused denial of service.
Solana bills itself as the world’s fastest blockchain, but it struggled to cope with a surge in demand that peaked at 400,000 transactions per second.
The transaction processing queue was then flooded, and because network-critical messaging wasn’t prioritized, the blockchain started to fork. On Twitter, the project said:
“This forking led to excessive memory consumption, causing some nodes to go offline. Engineers across the ecosystem attempted to stabilize the network, but were unsuccessful.”
Early on Wednesday morning, validators confirmed they had successfully completed a restart of the mainnet — and it was hoped DApps and block explorers would return within hours.
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Bad Timing
The outage has derailed the dramatic bull run that SOL had embarked on — with the token surging from $39.03 to an all-time high of $214.96 in the month to Sept. 9.
SOL has cooled considerably since then, and the current price of $159.89 is about 25% off this ATH.
The token’s value has also tumbled by 5% over the past 24 hours. By contrast, the top five cryptocurrencies — whereas Bitcoin, Ether, Cardano and Binance Coin — are all in positive territory.
On Tuesday, DeFi journalist Camila Russo tweeted:
“Days like today are good reminders to not take Ethereum's stability for granted. Eth has been under extreme pressure with ICOs, NFTs, DeFi; clients have been under attack; it has forked.. yet it has never had an outage since its 2015 launch.”
Inevitably, the outage had a knock-on effect on the protocols that are based on the Solana blockchain, too.
