Solana Suffers First Mainnet Outage Since June 1

Solana (SOL) suffered another outage on September 30 after a pair of nodes took down the entire network.

Doc restarts the Solana network
Doc reboots the Solana network

Solana, the fast and inexpensive Layer-1, suffered another outage on September 30 after a pair of nodes took down the entire network. According to Solana's status page, the Solana Mainnet was down for over 6 hours, but others claim the network outage lasted over 10 hours.

The Solana network is experiencing an outage and not processing transactions. Developers across the ecosystem are working on diagnosing the issue and to restart the network. - Solana Status

Solana is one of the few blockchains with actual adoption, and its network has struggled to deal with the extremely huge traffic spikes caused by bots during NFT releases and IDOs for hyped DeFi projects.

Why did the Solana Network Go Down This Time?

This time it looks like the Solana devs made a mistake. According to Solana validator operator @laine_sa_, "a misconfigured node caused an unrecoverable partition in the network." It seems like the fix was simple but slow: restart the Solana network and wait for 80% of validator operators to agree to the restart.

This is not a good look for the Solana team. Ideally, Solana could be used for high-frequency trading and consumer payments, since it's so fast and cheap. Solana also intends to release a mobile phone soon, absorbing Helium and its 5G network recently to support the endeavor. But how much can a high-frequency trading firm invest in Solana if it keeps going down, and who would want a phone from a company that has days of outages every year?

Solana has gained a negative reputation for having so many outages. Though it has been more reliable this year, any outages now are a big hit to the team’s effort to rebuild Solana’s reputation.