The Solana Blockchain Experiences Major Outage, Halting Block Production

The Solana blockchain encountered a significant outage on February 6, resulting in a complete halt of block production on the network. Engineers within the Solana ecosystem are currently investigating the cause of the outage on the blockchain’s mainnet-beta.

The outage began at approximately 10:22 UTC, as reported by validators and Solana’s official status page. The issue was initially noticed when more than 25 minutes passed without the creation of a new block on Solana, which typically aims for block times of 400 milliseconds.

“Solana Mainnet-Beta is currently experiencing a performance degradation, causing block progression to come to a halt. Core engineers and validators are actively investigating the situation,” stated Solana validator Laine on X.

This is not the first time Solana has experienced an outage. In February 2023, a similar incident occurred. Additionally, Solana faced a series of outages in 2022 due to node issues, and in September 2021, the network went offline for a staggering 18 hours. This latest incident marks the 11th outage that Solana has encountered over the past two years.

Despite Solana positioning itself as a provider of scalable solutions within a decentralized ecosystem, rivaling Ethereum, the network has struggled with recurring network problems, significantly undermining its claims of reliability.

According to the latest updates on the outage provided at the time of writing, Solana engineers have conducted an investigation and identified potential remediation measures. However, they have yet to confirm whether recovery is achievable without a coordinated restart across validators. The most recent optimistic slot identified was 246464040, with validators eagerly awaiting the next steps.

At approximately 5:43 EST, Laine confirmed that engineers were actively working on developing a release that incorporates the necessary remediation. This remediated build will be released following thorough testing. In the meantime, validators have already begun generating snapshots through local ledger states in preparation for a potential restart.

Please note that this story is currently developing, and Crypto Briefing will continue to provide updated coverage details to ensure accuracy and veracity.