Solana network resumes operations following extended outage

The Solana Layer 1 network was temporarily offline but restored after a five-hour interruption.

The network’s resumption of operations at 9:47 a.m. ET was facilitated by an upgrade to version 1.17.20 and a coordinated restart by validator operators.

Engineers from across the ecosystem are investigating an outage on mainnet-beta. This thread will be updated as more information becomes available https://t.co/rfeioQ6BG9

— Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) February 6, 2024

The team behind Solana has committed to ongoing performance monitoring as network functions return to normal — the downtime began at approximately 4:53 a.m. ET is under investigation, with a comprehensive report on the cause to be released in the future.

Matthew Sigel, the Head of Digital Assets Research at VanEck, has indicated on the social media platform X that the disruption may have been caused by issues related to the Berkley Packet Filter mechanism.

Solana outage, what happened?
BPF loader, the “Berkley Packet Filter,” which is the mechanism to deploy upgrade and execute programs on Solana, failed. This seems to relate to a previous SMID (Solana Improvement Proposal) that altered some of the features including the adding a…

— matthew sigel, recovering CFA (@matthew_sigel) February 6, 2024

The mechanism, crucial for deploying upgrades and executing programs on Solana (SOL), was reportedly affected by a recent Solana Improvement Proposal that made certain modifications, including removing a previously utilized feature.

Solana’s team communicated the outage through network status notices and social media updates. Initially, they announced that engineers were examining the mainnet-beta outage.