Solana Network Faces Another Outage?

RPC (Remote Procedure Call) endpoints managed by the Solana Foundation are currently down.

Solana Network Encounters Another Issue

RPC endpoints, which facilitate connections between crypto applications and the blockchain, are offline due to an error with Solana Validator's version 1.14 test. RPC, or "remote procedure call," is essentially a network communication model that allows developers to interact with the blockchain network more seamlessly.

According to Solana's announcement:

“The mainnet testnet and RPC endpoints are currently offline following the RPC software upgrade.”

The tweet also clarified that the incident does not impact Solana's block production capabilities, unlike previous outages or network failures. Other RPC services provided by Triton, QuickNode, and Alchemy are still functioning normally.

Austin Federa, head of strategy and communications at Solana Foundation, added:

“This issue only affects nodes operated by the Solana Foundation. Other nodes are running smoothly.”

This is the first incident Solana has faced in 2023, but the network experienced no fewer than five outages in 2022 alone. Most of these disruptions were caused by inadequate bot spam resistance, leading to transaction overloads.

The most recent issue involved over 1,000 nodes being disconnected due to a cloud service provider block, resulting in more than 22% of SOL staking rewards being unclaimed. The most frustrating incident occurred in May 2022 when the network was down for 8.5 hours, trailing behind the record 18-hour downtime in August 2021.

The outage does not appear to negatively impact Solana's SOL token price. In fact, SOL has increased by over 17% in the past 24 hours, following the general market trend on the morning of January 9.

1-hour Chart of SOL/USDT on Binance as of 09:00 AM January 9, 2023