Solana stops processing transactions, SOL sinks by 4%

Solana network is experiencing downtime in block production as block progression is currently halted.

When writing, the blockchain has been down for about two hours. The failure occurred on Feb. 6 at 10:00 UTC.

“Engineers from across the ecosystem are investigating an outage on mainnet-beta.”

Solana website

Laine, a blockchain software developer and Solana validator, clarified that the failure occurred due to a “decreased performance” of the leading network.

Laine later announced a network restart. Validators update software to v1.17.20. After reaching a share of 80%, the cluster will resume block production from slot 246,464,041 (the stop occurred at 246,464,003). At the time of writing, progress is 60%, “20% more to go.”

The SOL token responded to the blockchain shutdown by falling from around $96 to below $94, reaching $93.62. According to CoinMarketCap, the asset fell by more than 4% in 24 hours. However, token trading volumes increased by 11% to $1.6 billion amid the decline. This indicator may be hinting at the fact that traders have begun liquidating positions or buying on the coin’s drawdown.

In February 2023, Solana validators restarted the network twice due to an unknown error that caused economic activity to stop completely. The network stopped correctly processing user transactions on Feb. 25, and all functions except voting were disabled. One of the validators, Stakewiz, explained that the error occurred after most nodes switched to software version 1.14.16, which appeared last week.