Solana Outage: Why Network Was Down for Almost a Day

• Solana suffered an outage lasting 18 hours and 50 minutes on Feb. 25, the longest in over a year.
• The main cause of the outages is an on-chain consensus model which inflates transaction volume due to validator communication.
• During outages, validators have to communicate via Discord and reach a two-thirds majority agreement before any action can be taken.

Solana’s Network Outage

Solana suffered an outage lasting 18 hours and 50 minutes on Feb. 25, the longest in over a year.

Cause of Outages

The main cause of outages is Solana’s on-chain consensus model which inflates transaction volume due to validator communication.

Validator Communication During Outage

During outages, validators have to communicate via Discord and reach a two-thirds majority agreement before any action can be taken.

Network Performance Impacted

This design flaw bogs down the system, resulting in poor network performance.

Conclusion

Solana’s design results in long downtimes when the network does go down as it requires validator communication for resolution.