- The Solana blockchain was halted for four and half hours on June 1.
- Durable nonce Transaction bug’s avoidance cost the network a heavy toll.
Yet another outage in Solana blockchain within four months, but not as long as the prior 42 hours. The network halted at 4.56 PM UTC on June 1 and restarted at 9.06 PM UTC on the same day. The Solana team tweeted about the halt in Mainnet beta on Twitter.
Solana Team tweet:
Block production on Solana Mainnet Beta has halted. Validator operators should prepare for a restart in mb-validators on Discord. https://t.co/gRJJRqEMPn
— Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) June 1, 2022
The reason for the halt was the malfunction in the blockchain due to a bug in the durable nonce transactions, which produced a variation of data in the same block at different nodes. The validators were asked to prepare for restart in their discord community. The engineers were working on temporary patchwork parallelly and the team notified that data and network were secure.
Restart Mechanism
As mentioned before, within four and half hours the chain started functioning and the validators were informed to upgrade to 1.9.28 or 1.10.23. The technical instructions were provided in a document. The new upgrade dropped the durable nonce mechanism for the time being.
The validators were instructed to drop two arguments from the main script which are -wait-for-supermajority and –expected-bank-hash. Austin Federa, Chief of Solana Lab Communications, expressed, that the root cause of the trouble was already existing but the quantity was less to stress upon and the growth in recent time exaggerated the bug and its after-effects.
Fedra states:
“This was probably a bug that existed for a while but never really became an issue because it isn’t something that most people use”.
