Solana outage lasts 7 hours as NFT demand spills Over
The Solana blockchain is recovering after going dark in a seven-hour outage, caused by a significant rush of bots trying to mint nonfungible tokens on the crypto network.
An NFT minting program for Solana called Candy Machine struggled under a tsunami of traffic from bots seeking to push through transactions late Saturday, which caused Solana’s mainnet to fall out of consensus and crash as nodes belonging to validators collapsed under the weight. Validators are computers that verify transactions to maintain the integrity of the blockchain.
Developers and engineers from the Solana Foundation and Jump Crypto said the traffic reached a record-breaking high of 4 million transactions per second at around 8 p.m. in London on Saturday. On Sunday morning, validators had successfully completed a cluster restart and the Solana network was operating at degraded performance as nodes slowly came back online.
While Solana’s rise to the upper echelon of crypto’s top alternatives to Bitcoin and Ethereum has been rapid, the influx of bots and stability concerns meant this was not even its longest outage in recent months. The digital asset’s network suffered a wave of blackouts and service issues lasting as long as 18 hours in January, prompting ire from frustrated traders who watched their portfolio values decline while unable to offload tokens.
Solana Founder’s ‘Lol’ Amid Outages Irks Users of Crypto’s Next Big Thing
Overnight, the price of Solana’s SOL token fell as much as 7.4% to $83.90, data on Bloomberg show. It was down about 2% as of 6:54 a.m. in New York on Sunday, but is still trading 66% below its all-time high of $259 recorded back in November.
Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko applauded the network’s validators for working
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