Solana Outage Unveiled: What Caused the Downtime and Its Potential Impact

• The Solana blockchain has broken its 346-day streak of 100% uptime.
• Expert reveals that a bug might have triggered Solana’s recent downtime, and spotlights an incoming solution.

For the first time this year, the Solana blockchain network has experienced an outage. Not only was the outage unplanned and unexpected, but Solana users have continued to express their concerns over the situation and the possibility of a repeat in the future. The recent event triggered debate amongst cryptocurrency users across the broader crypto community.

On February 6th, the Solana blockchain network experienced a major outage that spiked community concerns. The outage lasted for almost 5 hours and triggered collective panic amongst Solana users.

Due to the recent developments, Solana has now broken its remarkable 346-day streak of 100% uptime, falling just 19 days short of completing a year without network downtimes or interruptions.

Providing clarity to concerned market players, Matthew Sigel, the Head of Digital Asset Research at VanEck explained what led to the outage, and provided information on when to expect a solution.

SOL Remains Unaffected by Solana’s Downtime

According to Sigel, the Berkley Packet Filter (BPF) loader, a mechanism used to deploy, upgrade, and excite programs on Solana failed. He added that the BPF failure relates to the previous SMID (Solana Improvement Proposal) that altered some of the features. SMID also added a blocker to halt metadata from being used in the BPF as it was no longer needed, he added.

Additionally, the alteration was also a part of upgrade 0093, and a bug was affiliated with it. The bug was noticed on the testnet, and although a fix was developed, it was yet to be integrated as it was still undergoing testing. Sigel observed that there were speculations that someone might have triggered the bug manually, and Solana went down as a result.

Explaining that a fix is incoming, Sigel disclosed that a fix has already been created and that developers have rewritten the BPF code lines to prevent the bugs. This means that the core software everyone runs must be patched for the software to run again.

Developers need to take certain steps that will eventually lead to a network restart. Validators also need to agree on block production and the network is expected to resume once 80% of validators agree on the last block. However, the network must fail again if the fix is no good, Matthew Sigel added.

To fully combat a downtime recurring in the future, Mathew Sigel explains that the Solana network must experiment and continue to evolve. “We believe a fix to this issue was already in the works.” He wrote.

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

Interestingly, SOL was not affected by the network outage as prices remained stable around the $94 price level. In the last 24 hours, the altcoin has recorded a 1% rise to trade for $95.10.