The downtime had immediate repercussions for Sui (SUI), the blockchain’s native cryptocurrency with its value dropping 11%.
Sui Network, a decentralized layer 1 blockchain often compared to Solana for its advanced smart contract capabilities, experienced a significant disruption on November 21.
The incident, which halted block production for over two hours, marked the first major outage on the network’s mainnet and prompted questions about its resilience and scalability in the competitive blockchain industry.
Unprecedented Downtime
The outage began at 9:15 AM UTC when block production ceased, according to SuiVision, the blockchain’s network explorer. Transactions were halted, leaving the blockchain entirely non-operational for over two hours.
The Sui Foundation later acknowledged the incident via social media, stating that the network was experiencing an outage but reassured users that the issue had been identified and a fix was underway.
According to the foundation, the outage stemmed from a bug in the transaction scheduling logic. This flaw caused validator nodes to crash, rendering the network inoperable. The foundation commended the rapid response of its validator community, which swiftly deployed a fix, allowing the network to resume block production within two hours.
Web3 security firm ExVul provided additional insights, attributing the issue to a denial-of-service (DoS) vulnerability triggered by an integer overflow in the network’s nodes. The firm also highlighted a patch available on GitHub to address the identified weakness.
The downtime had immediate repercussions for Sui SUI $1.93 24h volatility: 5.7% Market cap: $7.11 B Vol. 24h: $1.82 B , the blockchain’s native cryptocurrency. Its value dropped nearly 11%, falling to approximately $3.40 before recovering to $3.60 once the network was restored.
The network also led several major exchanges, including South Korea’s Upbit, temporarily suspended SUI-related transactions.
After the incident, Coinspeaker received a comment from the spokesperson for the Sui Foundation:
“On the morning of November 21, 2024, Sui experienced its first network outage due to a bug in congestion control code, which had been recently upgraded to allow for better shared object utilization. Sui contributors quickly deployed a fix restoring normal network activity in two and a half hours. The rapid, collaborative response from Sui’s validator operators is an incredible testament to the strength of the Sui community and the enduring usability of the Sui network itself.”
Not the First
While this was Sui’s first major outage on its mainnet, similar issues had occurred during testnet operations earlier this year. In March, the testnet experienced hours of downtime, followed by another incident in June. Additionally, public RPC nodes faced operational challenges in July but were restored within 1.5 hours.
Tim Kravchunovsky, founder and CEO of Chirp, a Sui-based decentralized telecommunications network, acknowledged the incident as a normal occurrence.
“Any blockchain aims to avoid such incidents entirely, but sometimes outages are unavoidable, just like our internet connection occasionally goes down,” he stated.
Meanwhile, Sui is not the only blockchain that recently suffered a network outage. On November 1, Coinspeaker reported ZetaChain, a layer-1 blockchain designed to enhance interoperability, went offline for six hours in October before it began block production.
The outage, which began around 11:53 p.m. UTC on Thursday, was attributed to a technical issue. According to the ZetaChain team, the disruption stemmed from a consensus failure caused by a new update applied to a subset of validators.
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