Solana Still Doesn't Know Why It's Suffered Yet Another Outage

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Solana suffered yet another outage over the weekend, with the project admitting that the root cause of the downtime is still unknown.

The disruption lasted for about 20 hours — prompting some on Twitter to call it "a piece of s***," and others to quip that it's more of a transaction killer than an Ethereum killer.

Some were also left scratching their head as to how this blockchain remains the 11th biggest in terms of market capitalization given how this has happened many times before.

In a blog post, Solana explained that engineers debugging the issues facing the network has recommended that it should be restarted — and validators agreed with this request.

A recent rollout of v1.14 was also reversed, returning the network to v.1.13.6, which was stable. A statement added:

"An initial restart attempt was called off to allow time for more thorough data analysis, and ensure no user transactions would be impacted. After further analysis, the community collectively restarted the network using an older slot than the one previously selected. No confirmed user transactions were rolled back or impacted."

This is a significant setback for Solana given how it has positioned itself as the home of faster, cheaper transactions than on the rival Ethereum network. The promise of lower fees has driven many DeFi protocols onto this blockchain, but there have been repeated concerns about its reliability.

While engineers raced to fix the outage, transactions were heavily disrupted. Paul Brody, the global blockchain leader at EY, tweeted:

"Solana is like a lifestyle-friendly blockchain because you can have nights and weekends off."

Last year, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko admitted that such outages have been the blockchain's "curse" — and blamed the technical snafus on the fact transactions are so cheap.

This latest downtime suggests there is still more work to be done before the network is dependable.