The Solana network had been halted because of a bug that interrupted the network’s operations. The outage, which Coinbase announced first on Twitter, affected the Solana mainnet. The “Ethereum killer” which is the current outage, appears to have been a series of recurring outages. An outage had last happened in early May of this year when the network remained down for around seven hours before being successfully restarted.
Solana gave an update explaining how the outage happened and what caused it minutes after it occurred.
“Earlier today a bug in the durable nonce transactions feature led to nondeterminism when nodes generated different results for the same block, which prevented the network from advancing.”
A developer from Solana also added on Twitter, “Chain splits occur when two parts of the network compute a different state given the same transactions for any reason. They are a class of bugs that are hard to prevent entirely, even with large test coverage, and affect any chain.”
He also stated that using many nodes to protect against chain-split vulnerabilities is a good idea. The developer further clarified that this restart is only a workaround for the situation, not a permanent repair.
At the moment, the system has been stabilized after 4 hours of the outage.