Solana Went Dark For 7 Hours Due To Bot Traffic Issue

Solana went dark for 7 hours because of a bot traffic issue but it wasn’t immediately clear how the traffic overcame network safeguards so let’s read more today in our latest blockchain news today.

Solana stakeholders rushed to right the network on Saturday with what one insider called an “insane amount of data” which flooded the PoS chain and knocked validators out of hte consensus and grinding being still in block production. Bots swarmed the popular NFT mining tool known as Candy Machine with an unprecedented tsunami of inbound traffic which is four million transaction requests and 100 gigabits of data each second which is a record for the network one source at the Solana Foundation noted.

For reasons that are not clear yet, the swarm pushed validators out of consensus. Block production became impossible and Solana went dark for 7 hours. The co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko said he was traveling because of the fracas, and credited the validator community for leading the mainnet recovery. He got caught flak on Saturday for being “MIA” during a network crisis. Saturday’s hard fork restart didn’t resolve with the new-and-improved code that populated across the validators. They picked up where the network flopped a few hours before.

In preparing for the restart validators mulled implementing code that will temporarily block Candy Machine transactions and some debated in the Discord channel that such a move can constitute censorship. It will only be effective if two-thirds of validators chose to be in and a few seemed to do so on Saturday night. Other parts of the ecosystem moved to bolster the defenses and Metaplex the key steward of Solana NFT infrastrcuture and closely intertwined with Candy Machine and noted that it will deploy a 0.01 SOL penalty to help NFT projects stanch excessive traffic.

The Solana ecosystem such as Phantom wallet and Mango Markets struggled to stand up in the aftermath as the RPC node providers went back online. The outage contributed to an albeit drawdown in SOL markets and the native token crashed to a 24-hour low of $83.13 which is three hours into the outage before going back towards $89. Solana core developers have to diagnose what went wrong Saturday or how the botting attack overcame the safeguards.