I hope you are all well and had an excellent weekend, welcome to CryptoGod-1’s blog on all things Crypto. Over the weekend the famed Blockchain Solana had another one of its outages, this time last for about 21 hours. While it is not a new occurrence for Solana, it has become something of a running joke at this stage and has raised many questions about the long term viability of the Blockchain.
Why Solana, Why?
On the 25th of February the Solana Blockchain went down for a total of 21 hours. Users who attempted to make transactions on Solana were greeted with an interesting messing, stating "sorry the internet is down." Not what anybody would want to be reading. It meant there was no possibility for anybody to trade crypto, transfer assets, or basically do anything on-chain. It all began on Saturday when the Solana Network began to fork during an upgrade form V1.13 to V1.14, which happened around 00.53am New York Time. This is due to basically two versions of validator software coexisting at the same time. This is according to the Solana Discord server, and confirmed via the Solana Status Twitter account.
Soon after that, the RAM began to increase while the chain’s transaction throughput fell off a cliff, and the combination of all this lead to a near freeze of all on-chain activity on the network. By 2.00am New York Time, about 93 transactions per second (TPS) were being processed by the network, which is a far cry from the 5000 or so TPS taking place some 15 minutes prior.
Some of the validators began to downgrade to previous versions of the network in a hope of reviving Solana’s throughput, while later Solana employees also began advocating for the downgrade. Within hours of this a majority of the validators had gone back to the older and original software, attempting to restore Solana's operations. A network restart to the point immediately prior to the issue is often the "last resort" but even after the majority of validators downgrading to V1.13 from V1.14, it did little to resolve the issues.
Within hours a supermajority of validators had switched back to the old software in their attempt to restore Solana’s operations. But it did little to solve the still unknown problem that was weighing down performance. The effort then turned to a more drastic solution: restarting the chain to the point immediately prior to the forking
“Coordinating a restart attempt means that the chain will be offline completely, which is always the last resort,” according to SolBlaze.
Eventually they got the Network back operational after around 20-21 hours of being offline, as noted in the Solana Status tweet below which was posted at 08.33pm New York Time. In the end they had to go to their last resort and perform a total network restart. Not good for the blockchain and not good for anybody who is seriously invested in Solana.
Last month, the co-founder of Solana, Anatoly Yakovenko, admitted that outages have been the blockchain's "curse" since its creation, and he placed the blame on the technical SNAFU (an acronym that stands for the sarcastic expression Situation normal: all fucked up) on the fact transactions are so cheap.
Online Reaction
Similar to many of the incidents in the 2022, especially in June, the latest halt and slowdown of the Blockchain has led to many questions the viability of how Solana manages inbound traffic. While there was no immediate culprit of the incident over the weekend, there is a theory from validator operators and network engineers that a bug in the new version of Solana code had been at fault. Whatever the cause, as one can imagine the community were not too impressed. Plenty had their opinions to express, some of which I have included below.
Solana, as reliable as the McDonald's Ice Cream Machine
After 17 hours since a successful transaction, how can anyone still be a Solana supporter?
Plenty of room on HBAR, and also Cardano, Ethereum, etc
Possibly one of the best, Solana is down and 7 hours later nobody cares.
And of course, did they just end up turning it off and on again?
Do you believe in Solana or think it can overcome its curse of network outages?
Have a great day.
CryptoGod-1.
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