Solana Restores Network Outage After Successful Cluster Restart, But SOL Price Still Struggling

Solana, a decentralized blockchain built to enable scalable, user-friendly apps, announced on Saturday that its network is back online following an outage on Friday night caused by a misconfigured node that stopped the blockchain from processing transactions.

A single misconfigured node took down the entire network – the glitch caused the outage for several hours. Solana informed its users about the blackout but raised confidence that its developers were on site working to diagnose and fix the problem.

A validator appeared running a duplicate validator instance, which caused the blockchain to fork because validators couldn’t agree on which one was correct.

The fork caused an obscure code path that left validators unable to switch back to the main fork. The software and blockchain company Stakewiz, which operates a validator node on Solana, explained the matter online via Twitter social media. Stakewiz suggested the Solana network’s failure to rectify the situation was due to a failed node failover setup.

After working to fix the blackout, the Solana developers made a decision to restart the network. The team said they performed the necessary restart of Mainnet Beta at 8 a.m. London time. The restart rebooted the network, and Solana then said “validators are operating successfully now. Network operators and dapps will continue to restore client services for the next several hours.”

Although Solana has been describing itself as a high-performance blockchain, the network has recently suffered a series of multiple outages. In September last year, the network went offline for nearly 18 hours.

In January this year, Solana witnessed a major blackout that lasted as long as 18 hours, the incident prompted anger from frustrated traders who watched their portfolio values plunge while unable to offload tokens. In early May, the network froze for about seven hours until validators restarted. In June, the network support structure suffered an outage of more than four hours.

Due to the latest network outage, the Solana token prices are down by 6.25% in the last 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap. At the time of writing, Solana's (SOL) price is trading at $32.93 per coin. SOL dropped by 2.12% in the past 7 days and is down 87.33% below its all-time high.