Solana Network Faces Critical Chain Split Issue, May Need Restart to Fix Bugs

Solana Network Faces Critical Chain Split Issue, May Need Restart to Fix Bugs

Update as of the Morning of February 26:

As of 09:25 AM on February 26, nearly 21 hours after the initial issue was detected, the Solana network has successfully restarted and is operating normally again.

The delay in the restart, which was initially agreed upon for the evening of February 25, was due to developers selecting the wrong blockchain timepoint for the fork. As a result, the first restart attempt had to be aborted and a second attempt was required.

Original Report:

As reported by Coin68, earlier in the afternoon of February 25, 2023 (Vietnam time), the Solana network encountered a "critical chain split issue," though the exact cause remains unidentified. This issue resulted in transactions on Solana being potentially unachievable.

According to updates on the Solana Discord channel, the blockchain began forking at around 12:53 PM today. Shortly thereafter, validator RAM usage spiked significantly, while the chain’s transaction throughput plummeted.

By approximately 2:00 PM Vietnam time, data from Solana Explorer indicated that the network was processing only about 93 transactions per second (TPS), a significant drop from nearly 5,000 TPS just 15 minutes prior.

Over four hours after the chain split issue was first detected, Solana developers were still unable to pinpoint the cause and were considering a network restart as a potential solution.

Specifically, validators on the network are reverting node software from version v1.14 back to v1.13, suspecting that the new version might be causing the issue. If this does not resolve the problem, a full network restart will be necessary.

However, Stakewiz, a validator, has assured that restarting the Solana blockchain will not reverse transactions that have already been confirmed.

The suspicion that version v1.14 may be to blame is not unfounded, as the v1.14 test release experienced technical issues in January.

This is not the first time Solana has faced significant issues. Throughout 2022, the network experienced no fewer than five major outages, most often due to inadequate resistance to bot spam, which led to transaction overload.

The most recent issue involved over 1,000 nodes being disconnected due to cloud service provider blocks, resulting in more than 22% of SOL staking not receiving transaction confirmation rewards. Perhaps the most notable incident was in May 2022, when the network was down for 8.5 hours, trailing only behind the record 18-hour outage in August 2021.

The price of Solana's SOL token has been following the general market downtrend, currently trading around $22.74, marking a 4% decline over the past 24 hours.

1H Chart of SOL/USDT on Binance, screenshot taken at 05:30 PM on February 25, 2023