Major Helium Network Outages Continue

The Helium (HNT) network has been experiencing major outages for almost a week. Helium, the crypto that's mined using specialized Internet hotspot devices, first started to experience problems on November 15. Starting that afternoon, the Helium blockchain was halted for almost 30 hours. Helium's "Proof-of-Coverage" mining system was down for over 30 hours, and Helium routers were down for almost 20 hours.

Helium explained what happened in their Discord, pointing toward a technical error. Helium said, "the additional loading of a recently released chainvar caused a router instance to propagate many stale state channels which resulted in a large number of duplicated transactions. This large number of duplicated transactions has caused a bottleneck resulting in longer than normal block times."

Helium has been releasing software fixes for this issue since the outage, and the network, mining, and blockchain have been up more than down lately. But there are still ongoing problems. Outages continued across most of the Helium product line through the weekend, and miners with older hotspot devices are struggling to re-connect to the network.

Despite the customer-facing Internet network and its blockchain going down, Helium's token retained its value. The token's value has trended with the crypto market since the outages began.