On Friday, the network of Solana stopped to process the transactions and lost connectivity due to a misconfigured node.
This is the fourth major outage that the popular blockchain had had to face since the start of the year. Previously, there had been a series of outages in January.
New outage
The new outage of the Solana blockchain comes almost a year after the outage that it had gone through in September of last year, which lasted for 18 hours.
Meanwhile, the SOL token, which is the native crypto of the blockchain, has lost 81% of its value this year because of the crypto winter.
Otherwise, the token is the 9th biggest token by market capitalization. On Friday night, at 7:01 pm EST, the Solana Foundation’s Solana Status site posted that the network was experiencing performance problems.
It also said that the blockchain developers were working on identifying the issue. It was not long after that Solana posted about the network experiencing an outage and it was not able to process any transactions.
The outage causes
The Solana validator operating Stakewiz.com said that the network had undergone a partition because of a misconfigured node.
According to Stakewiz, this problem should have been resolved by the Solana codebase, however, due to some unforeseen reason, it had resulted in an unrecoverable fork or partition.
Stakewiz said that the misconfiguration was considered to have been an accident and was likely a failed node setup.
Solana mainnet network had been restarted by the blockchain’s developers at the last slot that was confirmed, which was 153139220.
The reboot had been completed about 49% at the time of publishing and the Solana blockchain’s outage had been around 2 hours and 45 minutes.
Solana’s response
Solana Labs had not immediately come up with a statement to address the latest outage of its network once more.
In the past, there has been some quibbling between Solana executives and crypto media about the number of outages that the network has had to suffer.
Anatoly Yakovenko, the founder of the Solana blockchain had said earlier this month that the outages had become a curse for the network.
He also highlighted that there have been times that the Bitcoin blockchain has taken hours between two blocks in its history.
But, it is Solana that faces trouble. It is one of the several blockchains that are smart-contract and is popularly known as the ‘Ethereum killer’.
Solana has become immensely popular for the purpose of decentralized applications (DApps) and for minting NFTs (non-fungible tokens).
On September 15, the blockchain of Ethereum transitioned to the PoS (proof-of-stake) protocol, which makes Solana the third PoS blockchain in terms of market capitalization.
Cardano and Ethereum now occupy the first two spots. However, if Solana wants to truly compete with Ethereum, as it has been touted, then it would have to fix its problems.
This means that the network needs to stay up and eliminate these frequent outages in order to grow.
