The Layer 1 network Solana has successfully restarted following an outage that lasted approximately five hours.
According to an incident report released by the network, block production on Solana mainnet beta resumed at 14:57 UTC (9:57 a.m. ET) after a successful upgrade to version 1.17.20 and a restart of the cluster by validator operators. The report mentioned that engineers will continue to monitor performance as network operations are gradually restored.
The outage, which began around 09:53 UTC, persisted for a duration of five hours. Core contributors are currently investigating the root cause of the issue, and a comprehensive report will be provided once the analysis is complete.
Matthew Sigel, Head of digital assets research at VanEck, speculated on X that the failure might be attributed to the “Berkley Packet Filter” mechanism used to deploy upgrades and execute programs on Solana. He noted that a previous Solana Improvement Proposal (SMID) might have altered some features, including adding a blocker to prevent the use of metadata in the BPF, as it was deemed unnecessary.
At 10:22 UTC (5:22 a.m. ET), Solana issued a network status notice, stating that engineers from across the ecosystem were investigating the outage on mainnet-beta. During the disruption, block progression ceased, leading to transaction failures.
After approximately two hours of troubleshooting, Solana Status, a page managed by the Solana Foundation, announced on the social media platform X that engineers were preparing a new validator software release containing a patch to address the issue causing the cluster halt. Validator operators were instructed to prepare for an upgrade and restart of the network.
The last major outage experienced by Solana occurred in February 2023, lasting a few hours. Following two restart attempts, the network was successfully restored online.
