IDO Bots Responsible for Solana’s 18-Hour Network Outage, Team Explains

The team behind Solana yesterday gave a detailed report on how its validators from all over the world rescued the network from an outage that lasted nearly 18 hours.

IDO Bots Responsible for Solana’s Downtime

According to the report, the network outage was a result of Grape Protocol’s IDO, which launched on the Raydium exchange in the early hours of September 14th.

While trying to manipulate the rules of the IDO, several traders used bots to generate limitless transactions, causing the Solana blockchain to experience a memory overflow.

Since Solana’s mainnet is still in beta, it lacked prioritization of network-critical messaging, which caused it to start forking and slowed down transaction processing.

What the project thought could be fixed in a few minutes lasted for hours, as the continuous forking caused several validators to crash, and the network subsequently went offline.

Solana Restarts After Network Upgrade

All steps to resolve the issue, including a proposal by the validator community to restart the network at its initial stage, did not yield any positive results as transaction volume continued to surge.

Upon successfully diagnosing the problem, the community proposed a hard fork, which required at least 80% stakes to come to a consensus before the upgrade can be implemented.

The consensus prompted engineers to write codes from their various locations across the globe to mitigate the issue before the network was fully restored in about 18 hours after the lag started.

Blockchain Better than Amazon Web Services

Commending the efforts of its validator community, Solana noted that the development further buttressed the benefits of blockchain over centralized networks like Amazon Web Services (AWS).

According to Solana, when decentralized blockchain entities experience outages of such magnitude, the “validators are individually responsible for recovering the state and continuing the chain without relying on a trusted third party.”

The consensus of the community helped Solana to bring the network to its right state in less than 24 hours.

However, when similar technical problems occur on AWS, users will have no option but to completely rely on the company to solve the issue, which may most likely take days to weeks.

The benefits of blockchain cannot be overstated. The technology, which powers cryptocurrencies, has been widely adopted across various sectors, including finance, health, and politics, among others.