Solana Validators Prepare to Restart as Network Experiences 'Major' Outage
The Solana blockchain experienced a major outage today and stopped block production around 10:22 UTC.
Nearly an hour later, Solana validators were preparing to restart. They will restart the Mainnet-Beta cluster using version 1.17.20; jito-solana release is also available.
The incident comes a year after Solana experienced a two-day outage in September 2021. Despite rapid adoption, Solana has faced persistent technical issues that required several restarts.
According to a post by a validator on X, the latest outage degraded performance on Solana Mainnet-Beta, preventing new blocks from being added. As a result, transactions piled up that went unprocessed for more than 25 minutes — an eternity for a network designed to complete blocks every 400 milliseconds.
The effects of the outage became visible through the crypto ecosystem. SOL prices sank nearly 3.5% amid the uncertainty, falling below $94 from Tuesday's open above $97.
