According to CryptoPotato, the Solana network experienced a five-hour outage on Tuesday, with validators restarting the network before 10 am Eastern Time. Solana Labs attributed the downtime to a bug that caused transactions to enter an infinite loop. A post-mortem report by Anza co-founder Jeff Washington revealed that a bug in the Just-in-Time (JIT) compilation cache led to repeated recompilations of older programs, monopolizing network resources and halting the blockchain's operations. The bug affected version 1.17 of Solana's validator client, stalling all validators as 95% of the cluster stake was on that version. Solana Labs has implemented a fix to eliminate the preconditions required to trigger the bug and plans for a more comprehensive fix in the future.
Despite the network outage, Solana has experienced at least nine outages since September 2021, totaling over 150 hours of downtime. The bug was identified during a previous investigation and flagged to the Solana security team in mid-2022. Industry experts like Charles Hoskinson and Max Keiser criticized the outage, with Hoskinson mocking Solana on Twitter. The platform also faced criticism for alleged centralization despite implementing fixes to avoid outages. However, the Solana community remained unbothered during the incident, and SOL's price rebounded afterward, trading at $110 as of press time. Solana is now among the top-performing cryptocurrencies of last week, alongside Cardano (ADA).
