Solana Network Restart Successful after Two Attempts in 24 Hours

The technical issue on the Solana blockchain has been resolved, and the network is back online after two attempts to restart the network. The problem started on February 25 as transaction processing was not functioning as usual. Notably, the disruptions to transactions in the Solana blockchain, which happened after an upgrade in the validator software, caused validators to downgrade the software as they attempted to restore the network – the upgrade from 1.13 to 1.14 impacted block productions.

Due to a technical malfunction, validators initially downgraded the network to version 1.13. However, the network returned to normalcy, causing a further attempt, and it was eventually restarted on v1.13.6. The first attempt to restart the Solana network failed as validators had to pause the restart. Until the technical problem was finally fixed after the second attempt, users were unable to process transactions on the platform. At the same time, Solana users could not move their assets on the network during the outage.

Solana Network Restart Successful after Second Attempt

After more than 24 hours, the Solana network restart was successful at 01:28 UTC on February 26. Solana Status wrote on Twitter that the community was able to resume the cluster, and engineers will keep the network performance under close watch. The team also talked about a probe into the problem by engineers within the ecosystem. The community should expect a report on the investigation’s findings of the cause of the matter. About three hours ago, Solana Status tweeted that “the root cause of the 2-25-23 outage is still unknown and under active investigation.”

This is not the first time the Solana network needed a restart after downtime. Instead, the latest technical challenge is one of the multiple times the blockchain has had to deal with outages. The network suffered many outages in 2022 and it constantly has this problem. This is because of its high transaction throughput, which causes heavy pressure on nodes to stay in order. Despite the constant technical bugs, Solana enthusiasts believe that the recent challenge is a display of the network’s decentralization. Stating that voting happens on all decisions to downgrade or restart, Infrastructure provider Chorus One noted:

“Solana network issues demonstrate how genuinely decentralized the network is. Validators were stuck debating what version to run. Meanwhile, user transactions are not being processed. It is both a testament to the decentralization in Solana, and also the costs of decentralization.”

At press time, Solana is up 0.99% to $22.90. Despite the issues, SOL appears to be unmoved, as it gained 1% in the last 24 hours. Ranked the 13th largest crypto asset, its market capitalization jumped about 1% within the same period.