Solana Block Production Stalls for Hours, SOL Holders Unable to Transact, Validators Deploy a Fix

According to reports on social media, crypto forums, onchain metrics, and the Solana Status Twitter account indicate that Solana’s blockchain has stalled. Solana mainnet-beta suffered a four-hour downtime and is still down after a technical glitch.

** Editor’s Note: At 3:30 p.m. (EST) on Sept. 14, 2021, this post was updated with a statement written by the Solana Status Twitter account. At the time of update, Solana’s issues still persist and the community is preparing a fix.

Solana’s Network Stalls

In recent times, solana (SOL) joined the top ten crypto assets by market valuation and today, SOL’s market cap position is the seventh-largest. At the time of writing, SOL has been exchanging hands for $159 per unit and is down 2.8% during the last week.

@phantom I'm locked out of my Solana. It says "unable to connect to Solana" and no help anywhere on your website that makes sense to someone that doesn't know advanced coding. I shouldn't need to reconfigure my computer to access my Solana

— MattyG (@Mattygxrp) September 14, 2021

On September 14, the protocol suffered an error and at the time of writing, the chain stopped for a total of four hours so far, as the outage is still ongoing. On Tuesday, the Twitter account Lido Finance tweeted:

A tx overload has caused an OOM error in most Solana nodes, including validation nodes. The network is stalled, engineers in the team and the node operator community are working towards a resolution. Validators are preparing for a potential restart if necessary.

Lido Finance also told its Twitter followers to follow the ‘Solana Status’ Twitter account for more information. “Solana mainnet-beta is experiencing intermittent instability,” the Solana Status account detailed in a pinned Tweet. “This began approximately 45 minutes ago, and engineers are investigating the issue.”

Solana applications like explorer.solana.com have been displaying error messages like: “There was a problem loading cluster stats,” and popular SOL wallets like Phantom have had connection issues.

Estimates Say Solana Block Production Could Take a While

Some have said that the fix could take anywhere between 24 hours to 48 hours to fix the issues. “With transactions being filtered out, and failing commits, and validators need to upgrade and deploy… Will take about 24-48 hrs to fix,” the Twitter account called ‘bruce.codes’ explained.

In another tweet, ‘bruce.codes’ wrote that a “Solana fix [is] being deployed in v1.6.23.” The Solana Status Twitter account also added to the account’s initial outage tweet and said:

Resource exhaustion in the network is causing a denial of service, engineers are working towards a resolution. Validators are preparing for a potential restart if necessary.

Solana now joins the list of networks that have stalled by failing to produce blocks. For instance, back in February 2020, the IOTA blockchain was down for more than 11 days. The EOS blockchain has had issues with block production as well. Cardano has had issues with block production in the past and Solana had problems with block production in December 2020.

Furthermore, while Solana managed to knock XRP down a notch in recent times, XRP has once again managed to re-capture the sixth-largest market capitalization worldwide. At the time of writing, XRP is a touch over $3 billion ahead of solana’s (SOL) overall valuation.

** At approximately 3:12 p.m. (EST) the Twitter account called Solana Status tweeted about the ongoing issue one hour after this article was published. “Solana Mainnet Beta encountered a large increase in transaction load which peaked at 400,000 TPS,” Solana Status tweeted. “These transactions flooded the transaction processing queue, and lack of prioritization of network-critical messaging caused the network to start forking.”

The Twitter account added:

This forking led to excessive memory consumption, causing some nodes to go offline. Engineers across the ecosystem attempted to stabilize the network, but were unsuccessful. The validator community elected to coordinate a restart of the network – the community is preparing a new release, and instructions will be posted in Discord.