Lights Out For Solana

You may remember when Solana went offline late last year in September. Solana just experienced another outage over the weekend. At the time, it was unclear why it was happening. Let’s take a closer look to see what happened on Saturday.

• Solana went offline at around 4:30 p.m. EST. I went back online at around 11 p.m. EST on Saturday after a successful cluster restart.
• In a Twitter post on Saturday, they said, “Solana Mainnet Beta lost consensus after an enormous amount of inbound transactions (4m per second) flooded the network, surpassing 100gbps.”
• It turns out that volume was bots swarming the popular NFT minting tool, Candy Machine, earlier on Saturday with an “unprecedented tsunami of inbound traffic.”
• The outage led to a brief drawback in the SOL price. Solana’s native dipped to a 24-hour low of $83.13 roughly 3 hours into the outage before making its way back to $89 (according to CoinGecko).
• Solana core developers have still not figured out what happened on Saturday. More specifically, how the “bot attack” overcame the existing safeguards.

Can an outage like this happen again? Of course! Outages, while few and far in between, are something one must be conscious of and plan accordingly.