Solana — despite being one of the fastest-growing blockchains in the past few years, has gained a lot of heavy controversy on various cryptocurrency communities like Reddit and Twitter due to the ‘growing pains’ of the proof-of-history network.
We will update this list if it’s the case that Solana amassed more issues in the future.
| Major outage | 4 cases |
| Degraded Performance | 4 cases |
| Misc problems | 1 case |
| Total hours of downtime | 34.5 hours* |
| Total hours of degraded performance | 136 hours* |
*Total number of hours are only approximations
4.5-Hour Downtime ⬇️ — June 1, 2022
“A bug has knocked the Solana blockchain offline again as block production halted at 16:55 UTC on Wednesday. This latest outage lasted around four and a half hours as validator operators managed to restart the mainnet at around 21:00 UTC.” — Cointelegraph
Blockchain Clock Issue ⏰ — May 27, 2022
“Solana’s (SOL) blockchain clock is currently adrift of real-world time by about 30 minutes due to longer than ideal slot times on the network, the project reported via its status page on Thursday.
According to the notice posted at 3:34 UTC, the issue does not have any impact on network performance. Transactions on the network will, however, show timestamps that are different from “wall-clock time,” as the statement put it.” — The Block
7-Hour Downtime ⬇️ — May 1, 2022
“Validator operators of Solana, a proof-of-stake blockchain, successfully completed a cluster restart at about 11 p.m. ET on Saturday following a roughly seven-hour outage when the network failed to reach consensus, it said on Twitter.
An earlier Twitter post had said that Solana Mainnet Beta lost consensus after an enormous amount of inbound transactions (4m per second) flooded the network, surpassing 100gbps.” — The Block
Degraded Performance 🐢 — January 21-22, 2022
Duration: 29 hours and 22 minutes. — Solana Status
Degraded Performance 🐢 — January 4, 2022
“The Solana blockchain has suffered a third incident in just a few months that clogged the network and caused transactions to fail, with users debating whether it was caused by another distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack or if it was just network issues.
The scale and nature of the incident are hard to ascertain, with Coinbase, Wu Blockchain and Redditors reporting there had been an incident causing the network to slow and transactions to fail. However, Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko denied there had been a DDoS on this occasion.” — Cointelegraph
Degraded Performance 🐢 — December 9, 2021
“Solana’s blockchain performance was reportedly hit by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack over the past 24 hours. However, the network appears to have remained online throughout.
A DDoS attack generally refers to a large number of coordinated devices, or a botnet, overwhelming a network with fake traffic to take it offline.” — Cointelegraph
17-Hour Downtime ⬇️ — September 14-15, 2021
“On Sept 14 at 12:00 UTC, the GRAPE protocol launched an on-chain token offering on Solana’s mainnet-beta network on a first-come-first-serve basis. Parameters were already known beforehand, and some people really, really wanted some of those tokens.
Right around 12:00 UTC, a massive flood of transactions sent by multiple bots hit the network, trying to win the race and outcompete each other—effectively, and likely unwittingly, executing a distributed denial of service attack on mainnet-beta.
Unfortunately, this caused mainnet-beta to first slow down and then halt. The flood of transactions did not stop even after the network stalled.” — Jump Crypto
Degraded Performance 🐢 — September 2, 2021
Duration: 35 minutes. — Solana Status
6-Hour Downtime ⬇️ — December 4, 2020
“At approximately 1:46pm UTC on December 4th, 2020, the Solana Mainnet Beta cluster stopped producing blocks at slot 53,180,900, which prevented any new transactions from being confirmed. The Solana team is actively working with the validator community to restart the network. No funds are at risk, and the team’s primary focus is performing a smooth restart of the network. As information unfolds, we will continue to provide updates in this post, on Discord, and on our social platforms.” — Solana Labs
