Touted As The 'Ethereum Killer,' Solana Suffers Fourth Outage This Year

The Solana network SOL/USD stopped processing transactions and went offline on Friday due to a misconfigured node, marking the blockchain's fourth significant outage since January, when it had a succession of partial outages for most of that month.

One year has passed since a roughly 18-hour outage in September of last year.

Meanwhile, SOL, the ninth-ranked cryptocurrency by market capitalization, has dropped 81% in 2022 due to the bearish phase the crypto market is facing.

The Solana Foundation's Solana Status website said on Friday night at 7:01 p.m. EST, the network was "experiencing degraded performance" and that Solana engineers were attempting to identify the problem.

The network is "experiencing an outage and not processing transactions," Solana stated shortly after.

Also Read: DOGE Co-founder Says He Sees Fewer Spambots, Thinks Twitter Has Done Something

What led to the disruption?

The Solana validator behind Stakewiz.com tweeted about the outage, saying, "It appears a misconfigured node caused an unrecoverable partition in the network. Validators, please participate in finding consensus on the relevant data."

According to Stakewiz, the Solana codebase was intended to address the problem, but for some reason, it resulted in an irreversible split or fork.

According to them, the incorrect setting was unintentional and was probably a faulty node failover setup.

The Solana mainnet network was resumed by developers at the last confirmed slot, 153139220.

Solana had been down for 2 hours and 45 minutes and the reboot was 49% complete.

What is Solana’s stand on its blackouts?

A request for comment on this outage from Benzinga was not immediately met with a response from Solana Labs.

While Solana executives have argued over different estimates of the total number of outages in the past, founder Anatoly Yakovenko said earlier this month that outages have been "our curse" and pointed out that the Bitcoin blockchain has occasionally in the past had hours pass between two blocks.

Solana is a well-known blockchain for creating non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, and decentralized apps.

It is one of a number of smart-contract blockchains touted as "Ethereum killers."

Solana has become the third-largest proof-of-stake blockchain - after Ethereum ETH/USD and Cardano ADA/USD - by market size since Ethereum switched to proof-of-stake on Sept. 15.