Solana’s blockchain network suffered yet another outage last weekend. Due to congestion caused by excess transactions, Solana was down for 7 hours.
A number of transactions beyond the usual would have been done by bots, that is, software programmed to perform actions repeatedly. Their goal was to be able to secure NFTs from the Candy Machine collection, available on the network. Solana is one of Ethereum’s main competitors in the NFTs market, where it stands out.
As reported by Solana developers, the amount of transactions per second was impressive. There were, on average, 4 million transactions per second, in addition to 100 gigabits of data per second.
The network validator nodes were not able to support the transaction weight. They are computers that verify transactions, maintaining the integrity of the blockchain, so they had to be restarted. The network was unavailable for 7 hours overnight from Saturday to Sunday.
“Validator operators completed a restart of the Mainnet Beta cluster at 3:00 am, after an approximately 7-hour outage after the network was unable to reach consensus. Network operators and dApps will continue to restore customer services in the coming hours,” wrote Solana’s official Discord channel. The term “mainnet” is widely used to refer to the main network of the blockchain.
Blockchains often have scalability issues and difficulty processing large numbers of transactions. In this sense, Solana ends up gaining a negative highlight. It is not the first time that Solana has experienced network outages . In January alone, the same happened six times. In total, there were 11 outages in the first quarter of 2022.
The weekend’s disruption did not go unnoticed for the price of SOL, the network’s native cryptocurrency. The currency, which had been in a continuous downward movement since the beginning of the year, dropped from almost US$ 90 to approximately US$ 84. This Monday, the 2nd, the SOL has dropped 5.27% in the last 24 hours and is priced at $86.