The Solana Foundation has released a report on the hours-long network slowdown and technical issues that began on Saturday. This latest outage of the blockchain has caused considerable distress in the community, as it occurred during the upgrade from 1.13 to 1.14.
On February 27, Solana Status tweeted the Solana Mainnet Beta Outage Report, which provides insight into the cause of the outage on February 25. Although the root cause is still unknown, the team is actively investigating to uncover the exact reason. The report will be updated regularly as new information becomes available.
According to the report, Solana Mainnet Beta experienced a significant performance decline at 05:46:16 UTC on February 25. In response, validators took action and restarted the chain with the previous upgrade, restoring normal network operations by Sunday at 01:28 UTC.
Solana endured an unprecedented 20-hour outage, during which no successful transactions were processed. In response, validator nodes automatically entered vote-only mode, a 'safe mode' designed to help the network recover from data unavailability.
The validator community and engineers collaborated to downgrade to the previous stable release, v1.13.6, in order to reduce the risk of restarting the network. After collecting more data on the outage, engineers called off the initial restart attempt and the rollback was decided in the second restart attempt.
Solana Blockchain has been experiencing a persistent outage, and there are several factors that could be contributing to this issue. One possible reason is the high level of network activity, which has been causing congestion and slowing down transaction processing times. Another factor could be the complexity of the Solana network itself, which may be causing technical glitches and software bugs that are difficult to diagnose and fix.
Furthermore, the rapid growth of decentralized applications (dApps) on the Solana blockchain may also be putting additional strain on the network infrastructure, leading to increased downtime and instability. Additionally, the decentralized nature of the Solana blockchain, which is designed to operate without a central authority, can make it challenging to coordinate and resolve technical issues quickly and efficiently.
Over the past two years, Solana Blockchain has experienced more than a dozen outages, with experts attributing the major cause to the system's design.
Solana handles all consensus on-chain, meaning that all validator communications are processed on the chain, similar to a transaction. This has caused a dramatic increase in both transaction volume and transactions per second (TPS).
The vivid pink portion of the Solana blockchain represents actual transactions, which account for only 10% of the chain. The remaining 90-95% is composed of validator messages, votes, and other data, which can cause the system to suffer outages as more activity impacts its performance.
At the time of writing, SOL is trading sideways at $22.83 after a two-day decline. Over the past week, Solana has dropped by nearly 15%, with trading volume also significantly decreasing.
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