Solana suffered another outage on Sunday Asia time, after the network lost consensus due to bots flooding the non-fungible token (NFT) minting tool “Candy Machine,” spamming more than six million transactions per second.
See related article: Solana DeFi avoids meltdown as Wormhole loss replaced
Fast facts
- The network was down for about seven hours before being rebooted at roughly 11 a.m. HKT thanks to developers sharing cluster restart instructions via Twitter.
- Solana is still investigating why the network was unable to recover from the surge in transactions.
- Developers announced they would soon deploy a botting penalty on the Candy Machine program to enhance network stability.
- Solana has suffered a string of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in recent months, causing network-wide slowdowns.
- Attacks like these have drawn criticism of the network’s consensus mechanism and low transaction fees that lower the cost of such attacks when compared to that of Bitcoin or Ethereum.
- Solana’s price dropped sharply following the announcement of the system outage to its lowest price since late March but has since partially recovered to trade at US$89.94 at press time.
See related article: What is the Solana ecosystem and how is it fueling SOL’s stratospheric rise?
