CryptoPotato published an opinion article stating that the Solana network experienced five hours of unavailability on Tuesday. Validators, a key component responsible for processing and verifying blockchain transactions, restarted the network before 10 a.m. EST. Solana Labs attributed the recent five-hour blockchain downtime on February 6 to a vulnerability that put transactions into an infinite loop.
According to a post-mortem report published by Anza co-founder Jeff Washington, a vulnerability in the Just-in-Time (JIT) compilation cache caused repeated recompilation of old programs, monopolizing network resources and causing the blockchain to stop functioning. In other words, the vulnerability caused an infinite recompilation loop in Solana's transaction process. It affected version 1.17 of the Solana validator client, so all validators were blocked because 95% of the cluster stake was on that version. The fix eliminates the prerequisites needed to trigger the vulnerability, but Solana Labs said a more comprehensive fix is planned in the future.
Solana has experienced at least nine outages since September 2021, totaling more than 150 hours of downtime. It is worth noting that this vulnerability was discovered during a previous investigation and was flagged to the Solana security team in mid-2022.
The outage sparked criticism from industry experts like Charles Hoskinson and Max Keiser, with the former mocking Solana on Twitter. Despite implementing fixes to avoid the outage, Solana was also criticized for alleged centralization. Still, during the incident, the Solana community remained nonchalant, ignoring trolls and criticism.
The price of SOL has since rebounded, trading at $110 at press time. Solana is now one of the best performing cryptocurrencies of the past week, alongside Cardano (ADA).
