Solana, the high-speed blockchain platform known for its low latency, faced a temporary setback on Tuesday with a network outage lasting approximately five hours.
The interruption in service led to a noticeable dip in the price of Solana's native SOL token, which dropped from around $96 to just below $94 during the incident.
Blockchain data indicated that normal transaction processing resumed at approximately 15:00 UTC after a halt that began around 09:52 UTC. This latest pause in operations occurs nearly a year after the network experienced a near two-day shutdown in February 2023.
During the height of the issue, Solana validator Laine announced via an X post, "Solana Mainnet-Beta is experiencing a performance degradation, block progression is currently halted, core engineers & validators are actively investigating."
The core engineering team later identified a fix and commenced the construction of a new version for validators to adopt, as shared by network validator @mtromp in another X post.
https://twitter.com/SolanaStatus/status/1754813351945789491
In subsequent updates, it was revealed by Laine that validators had started creating snapshots based on their local ledger state, which represents the most recent data prior to the outage, as part of preparations for a network restart.
The Solana Foundation, responsible for the upkeep of the network, stated that the new validator software release would contain a patch to resolve the issue that led to the network halt.
It urged validator operators to gear up for an upgrade and network restart. Validators, the backbone of blockchain integrity, contribute their computational resources to maintain the network and process transactions. Snapshots are pivotal in preserving the integrity of the blockchain, serving as a precise record of the data up to a specific moment in time.
