The Solana Mainnet Beta experienced a denial of service due a large spike in transactions. Engineers across the ecosystem attempted to stabilise the network but were unsuccessful. The validator community decided to coordinate a complete restart of the network. The network is back online again after 80% of the validators restarted and upgraded to version 1.6.25.
The issue began at 1pm GMT on 14th September and network outage lasted around 18 hours until 7am GMT on 15th September. Anatoly Yakovenko, Solana CEO, tweeted that the cause of the increased transaction load was due to Raydium IDO bots trying to snipe tokens at launch.
The price of SOL hasn’t been affected much despite the outage experienced by the Solana network. At the time of writing, SOL is trading at $159 which is only down 10% since the beginning of the outage. SOL is still up around 600% from July 2021 when it was trading at $23.
Questions and concerns have been raised around the seeming centralisation of the Solana network. Chris Blec pointed out how only 20 validators would be required to shut down the entire network.
While Gavin Wood, co-founder of Ethereum and creator of Polkadot and Kusama, compared Solana to traditional banks.
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