Solana Mainnet Suffers Significant Downtime, Leading to Drop in SOL Token Price and Exchange Suspensions

Engineers scramble to address issues as Solana experiences its first major outage of the year, impacting token value and exchange operations.

Solana engineers have confirmed that the ecosystem's mainnet has encountered its inaugural major outage of 2024. An incident report released on Tuesday acknowledged the disruption, stating that "engineers from across the ecosystem are investigating an outage on mainnet-beta." According to trackers monitoring the Solana blockchain, the processing of blocks ceased just prior to 10:00 UTC.

"Block progression is currently halted, core engineers and validators are actively investigating," Solana validator Laine, communicated via X (formerly Twitter), disclosed. Additionally, Solana validator Stakewiz indicated that developers are in the process of constructing a release to address the issue. Once completed and tested, further instructions will be disseminated to validators. Stakewiz also mentioned that validators have initiated the generation of snapshots using their local ledger state to prepare for a restart, while core engineers finalize the release.

In response to the Solana mainnet outage, the SOL token experienced a 2% decline, reaching $94. The impact of the Solana network outage has extended to crypto exchanges, with Upbit announcing the suspension of deposits and withdrawals for Solana-based tokens, including SOL, GMT (GMT), Raydium (RAY), and Access Protocol's (ACS).

Solana's status page confirms that this outage marks the mainnet's first major disruption since February of the previous year, which endured nearly 19 hours of downtime. However, it's worth noting that this isn't the first instance of network instability for the Solana blockchain. The network has encountered multiple outages since its inception, with the latest incident marking the eleventh within a span of two years.