The Solana Mainnet Beta had lost consensus after a flood of transactions – reportedly 4 million per second and at over 100gbps – hit the network on Saturday.
“Validator operators successfully completed a cluster restart of Mainnet Beta at 3:00 AM UTC, following a roughly 7 hour outage after the network failed to reach consensus. Network operators and dapps will continue to restore client services over the next several hours.”
This is a second major outage for Solana, a PoS blockchain that’s only behind Ethereum for NFTs. In September last year, the network went dark for 17 hours amid another flood of inbound transactions.
According to details shared on Twitter, Solana went offline on Saturday around 20:00 UTC after bots flooded it with 4 million transactions per second and 100gbps of transaction data.
The transactions were largely related to the Metaplex Candy Machine, an NFT program most new Solana projects use to mint NFTs.
With such a huge demand on the network, validators ended up unable to reach consensus. The result was that block production stopped.
In the market, SOL, the native token of the Solana network, slumped sharply following the incident. SOL/USD traded to lows of $83.19 before recovering slightly after the restart.
The pair currently changes hands around $88.56, nearly 5.6% down in the past 24 hours as the broader crypto market battles sell-off pressure.
The post Solana restarts after bots cause a 7-hour outage appeared first on CoinJournal.
