Solana’s Sixth Network Outage will Surely Push SOL Price Down the Hill

Solana is facing downtime after the production of new blocks on the network has ceased.

Solana's novel hybrid blockchain reportedly handles 65,000 transactions per second and is built for decentralized applications, finance, and smart contracts — supposedly making it a surefire "Ethereum Killer." However, in 2022 Solana had 12 serious outages driving the price of its native coin SOL down more than 78% this year. On June 01, 2022, the latest outage shut down the network for four hours and 10 minutes, which means a peak potential of 975 million transactions did not occur during that blackout.

Solana is facing downtime after the production of new blocks on the network has ceased. According to data from Solana Beach block explorer, Solana's validators have not processed new blocks for the last five hours, causing a total shutdown of all of its applications.

A recent post from Solana Status said that the mainnet beta now needed a restart from validators. "Validator operators should prepare for a restart in mb-validators on Discord," the post read. As of press time, discussion toward a restart was ongoing in the validator Discord chat.

To mitigate this situation, the Solana team has asked validators to restart the network. It has released instructions for validators, which includes taking a snapshot of a specific time slot from where the network can be rebooted.

For now, all network funds are secure, but transactions cannot be processed as no blocks are being created. Blocks are the data units in which new transactions are added to a cryptocurrency's ledger over time.

Back in September, Solana experienced a similar outage due to "resource exhaustion" that caused a denial of service across the network.

In January, the network again experienced a major slowdown from an influx of "high compute transactions," causing many others to fail. Even last month, millions of NFT transactions caused the network to clog and go down again.