Solana Faces First Outage of the Year; Engineers Deploy Fix as SOL Dips 3%

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The Solana layer one (L1) blockchain is currently experiencing a service disruption, with the Solana Status website revealing that engineers are actively probing the cause. Validators on mainnet have received instructions to implement an upgrade to version 1.17.20 and to initiate a system reboot.

** Editor’s note: Solana Status notes that block production resumed at 14:57 UTC. A final paragraph has been added to reflect the update.

Solana Network Experiences Disruption, Prompting Urgent Upgrade and Reboot

Presently grappling with its first outage of the year, Solana has otherwise maintained a 99.8% operational status over the preceding 90 days, notwithstanding the interruption. This setback is part of a series of disruptions that Solana has encountered in 2020, 2021, and 2022, during which times the blockchain was offline for extended periods, unable to generate blocks.

An initial status update, tagged “mb-020624” on the Solana Status web portal, indicates that the development team is delving into the problem. Additionally, updates regarding the situation have been communicated to the public via the Solana Status X account.

“Engineers from across the ecosystem are readying a new validator software release, which includes a patch to address an issue which caused the cluster to halt,” the Solana Status X account posted. “Validator operators should prepare for an upgrade and restart of the network.” The social media account associated with Solana added:

Mainnet validator operators: release version v1.17.20 is ready — please upgrade and restart.

The operator of the X account further left a Github page with instructions on how to restart. Solana’s native crypto asset SOL dipped more than 3% on the news trading for just over $94 per unit. SOL is the fifth largest crypto asset by market capitalization valued at $41.12 billion on Feb. 6, 2024. Following the release of version 1.17.20, Solana Status noted that block production had resumed.

“Block production on Solana mainnet beta resumed at 14:57 UTC, following a successful upgrade to v1.17.20 and a restart of the cluster by validator operators,” the update states. “Engineers will continue to monitor performance as network operations are restored. The outage began at approximately 09:53 UTC, lasting 5 hours. Core contributors are working on a root cause report, which will be made available once complete,” the website update adds.

What do you think about the Solana network outage? Share your thoughts and opinions about this subject in the comments section below.

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