Crypto News- Solana suffered a significant setback on Tuesday, grappling with a five-hour outage attributed to a bug within its layer 1 blockchain validators. An in-depth post-mortem report by Anza, a respected Solana-based software development firm, shed light on the root cause, revealing an ‘infinite loop’ glitch that plagued the system.
This bug, as detailed in the report, triggered a recurring cycle of operations among validators, effectively halting the confirmation of new blocks—a critical function of the Solana blockchain. Jeff Washington, a member of the Anza team, likened the situation to a ‘classic infinite loop,’ wherein validators were trapped in a perpetual recompilation cycle, unable to progress and thus bringing consensus to a standstill.
Deciphering Solana’s 5-Hour Downtime: The Root Cause Explained
Interestingly, the bug had been initially detected on a test network, as revealed in a post-outage analysis shared by Matthew Sigel of VanEck and echoed by Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko. Despite the discovery, the fix had not been promptly implemented, citing the need for thorough testing protocols. Notably, reports indicate that Solana’s security team had been made aware of the bug as early as April 2022.
In response to the crisis, Solana developers swiftly rolled out a patch, and following a network restart overseen by validator operators, normal block production resumed. Despite the turbulence, the native cryptocurrency SOL managed to maintain stability, with its value hovering around $97 during the outage and experiencing a subsequent 9% surge to $105.60 since Tuesday, according to CoinGecko data.
Although this outage marks Solana’s first major disruption in nearly a year, it’s worth noting that the network has encountered sporadic outages in the past, contributing to user frustrations. Moving forward, rigorous testing and proactive bug resolution will be crucial to ensuring the reliability and resilience of the Solana ecosystem.
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