The Solana network is again suffering technical issues, halting block production and transaction processing on the blockchain. After several hours, the team has detected the problem and is negotiating a network restart among validators.
According to the Solana blockchain explorer Solana Beach, a transaction has not been executed on Solana for 6 hours and 48 minutes. Solana Status announced the issue on Twitter and advised all validators to prepare for a network restart.
Block production on Solana Mainnet Beta has halted. Validator operators should prepare for a restart in mb-validators on Discord. https://t.co/gRJJRqEMPn
— Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) June 1, 2022
Later, the team said that “A bug in the durable nonce transactions feature led to nondeterminism when nodes generated different results for the same block, which prevented the network from advancing.”
Engineers are preparing an update that temporarily deactivates the durable nonce transaction functionality until a permanent fix can be done.
All network funds are now safe, but no transactions can be executed since no blocks are being generated. Blocks are the data units to which new crypto transactions are added over time.
In September, Solana had a similar outage caused by “resource exhaustion”, resulting in a network-wide service denial.
In January, the network faced a significant slowness due to an inflow of “heavy compute transactions,” which led to the failure of many others. Even last month, millions of NFT transactions forced the network into congestion and outage.
Typically, Solana has a throughput of up to 50,000 tps, allowing quicker and cheaper transfers than other chains. However, Ethereum has witnessed millions of failed-but-paid transactions in recent months, mainly due to its high gas prices.