The Solana network has suffered yet another outage, raising questions about its reliability. The network has been facing multiple issues in the last couple of months. In the latest outage, the Solana network was down for nearly 30 hours between January 21 and 22. What’s more, it’s the second such outage this month alone.
Early this month, due to network congestion, several transactions on Solana had failed. Besides, the network also faced slower speeds. As we know, Solana is touted as the “Ethereum killer” precisely because of its higher transaction speeds and lower costs. But, the increasing networks outages are casting doubts over its reliability.
Solana network outage: What happened?
“Solana mainnet beta is experiencing high levels of network congestion,” the Solana Status page tweeted on January 22. However, it was only after 24 hours that the team was able to identify the cause of the problem. It added that the latest Solana network outage was due to “excessive duplicate transactions.”
The outage comes amid the wider crypto crash in the market. According to a detailed report published by Solend, the autonomous interest rate machine for Solana, bots caused the network outage. Reportedly, bots started spamming the network as the transactions were cheap. Unfortunately, several users who took loans against collateral assets were unable to save their assets. This led to a large number of liquidations.
“There were many failed attempts at depositing and repaying, which made it difficult for users to save their accounts from being liquidated,” the report further said. “Liquidation and arbitrage bots began submitting a high volume of transactions in an effort to win liquidations and trades.” The increased duplicate transactions also “drowned out legitimate user transactions.”
“Tried over 100 times to repay a Solend loan, failed,” Zain Allarakhia tweeted. “Couldn’t even send a friend some USDC for dinner with @phantom.”
To fix the issue, engineers released version 1.8.14. Along with this, Solana will also reimburse users “who were liquidated during the incident” with 50% of the liquidation penalty. In addition, the team will reimburse users who were “affected by abnormal volatility on the SOL feed” with 100% of the liquidation penalty.
Solana users are not happy
Due to various issues with Ethereum, Solana was becoming a favourite among many crypto enthusiasts. In fact, several Solana NFT collections had started trending in the market. However, the recent Solana network outages have not gone down well with many users.
Author Mark Jeffrey, for instance, said he has no faith in Solana now. “This is like the sixth time this has happened in 3 months,” he tweeted. “I have zero faith in it now. It is the new EOS.”
On the other hand, tech investor Daniel Cheung said, “Solana being down for 48 hours multiple times now makes me question the viability of a monolithic structure.”
SOL prices have also crashed. From its position as the fourth largest cryptocurrency last month, SOL has fallen to the eighth position. Clearly, this is a wake-up call for the Solana network. If the network outages keep happening, Solana is likely to lose more users.
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