Solana Price Plunges as Blockchain Suffers Outages Again
Solana’s price has taken a hit amid another major outage that has halted network activity.
Crypto expert and host of the NFT Alpha show, Nick Valdez first Brought the development to public attention on Twitter after a series of speculative mentions. A few hours later, the official Solana Twitter handle confirmed the report early on Saturday.
According to the handle, the network experienced an outage and transactions were no longer being processed. The Solana team assured the community that network developers were already at work trying to resolve the issue.
This incident marks the fourth time Solana has experienced a major power outage this year. The network is now known in the crypto community for occasional blackouts, as several advocates have cited the pattern as a reason to steer clear of the chain.
After confirmation of the power outage, Solana shared a document instructing validators on steps to help resolve the issue. The network has been restarted as of press time and is fully operational.
Despite the solution, the network outage lasted over 8 hours. Solana’s price has, in line with the majority of the markets, seen a fall within this time frame. While it may be a stretch to attribute Solana’s current price situation to the recent power outage, the asset has undoubtedly suffered from a network outage in the past.
Solana is currently trading at $32.98 at press time, down 3.43% in the last 24 hours. Since falling from the high of $47.9 on August 13, the asset has been caught in a bearish pattern. The asset saw a free fall from August 13 to August 19 that brought it below the $40 mark. Solana has not revisited the $40 zone since then.
What caused Solana’s recent power outage?
Limited information has emerged about the cause of the problem. Laine Stakewiz, a blockchain company that operates Solana nodes, recently shared insights on the matter.
Several Solana validators stopped voting around 22:40 (UTC) on Friday. Operators received alerts about the issue and gathered on Discord to discuss it and find a solution. The network appeared to be stuck when it was confirmed that no new roots were being produced.
In accordance Laine Stakewiz, it was noticed that a validator shared an invalid block. The incident itself should not result in a major problem as it can be resolved by the network. Despite that, the validator appeared to have been on two “instances”, both of which produced an invalid block. The action led to the creation of a fork.
The fork in turn resulted in an abstruse code path with validators stuck on it. Attempts to switch to the main fork of Solana proved futile, leading to a halt in network activity. After discovering the core issue, developers noted that a reboot of the cluster was required to resolve the outage.
