Early on Saturday morning, the Solana network experienced a technical issue that hindered users’ ability to trade crypto, transfer assets and perform other tasks on the blockchain. This resulted in the blockchain ‘forking,’ meaning conflicting versions of its transaction history were created at around 00:53 New York time. At this time, validators noticed increased RAM usage and a sharp decline in the chain’s transaction throughput.
This effectively halted almost all on-chain activity, with Solana Explorer data showing that at 02:00, the network was processing only 93 transactions per second compared to the near 5000 TPS rate seen around 15 minutes prior. Infrastructure operators on the network worked swiftly to restore functionality.
Saturday’s incident was reminiscent of Solana’s challenges in 2022 when its traffic management systems had to be overhauled due to a series of halts and slowdowns. This time, however, there was no obvious culprit; validator operators and network engineers suspected that it might have been caused by a bug in the code that had come online hours before.
Some validators began downgrading to a previous version of the code to revive Solana’s performance, and Solana employees later backed up their efforts. Soon after, a supermajority of validators had switched back to the old software but with no success in solving the underlying issue. Consequently, they resorted to more drastic measures, such as restarting the chain to the point immediately before the forking—an attempt that would render the network entirely offline. As SolBlaze (a pseudonymous pool operator and active developer) noted, this was always a last resort.
