Solana Labs Explains Outage as SOL Cryptocurrency Continues Rising

Solana Labs recently released details about the outage that paralyzed transactions on its mainnet for five hours, pointing to a bug already known to developers as the villain behind what happened.

This same bug had previously caused problems on Devnet, but despite efforts to mitigate one of the triggers with an update, the second trigger remained active until it was addressed in version 1.17.20. Solana promises a more comprehensive fix soon, following the regular update schedule.

This bug was previously identified as the cause of a Devnet outage the previous week. Of the two legacy loaders that could trigger the bug, one (“v1”) was already disabled for deployment and the other (“v2”) was discontinued and scheduled to be disabled for deployment during the v1.18 release cycle. The chosen mitigation was to backport the v2 deployment retirement changes to v1.17 and remove the resource port, making the “v2” deployment disabled immediately after the cluster restart. This fix eliminates the ability to create the preconditions needed to trigger the bug, which was a simpler resolution. A more complete fix will be included with additional improvements to LoadedPrograms and may stabilize with the regular release cycle.

With a clear objective of offering speed and stability, Solana stands out for its theoretical ability to process between 50,000 and 65,000 transactions per second. However, this promise has been challenged by criticism regarding stability and network failures, leading even co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko to recognize outages as a persistent challenge. Still, before the most recent incident, the network had maintained an impressive record of 100% uptime since significant congestion in February 2023.

Although the outage negatively impacted the market value of the SOL cryptocurrency initially, with a drop of 2.1%, the recovery was quick and notable. Investor confidence appears unshakable, with SOL recording a 17% increase since the incident. This upward movement reflects solid support from the community and investors, even in the face of technical challenges.

At the time of publication, the price of Solana was quoted at US$108.94, up 0.3% in the last 24 hours and 11% in the week.

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