Solana network experienced its first major outage in nearly a year yesterday, marking its 11th instance of downtime. After approximately five hours of effort, Solana was able to restore normal operation by upgrading the validator software to version 1.17.20 and restarting with assistance from validator operators, around 11 p.m. last night.
Officials stated that core contributors are currently working on a root cause report, which will be provided once completed. Additionally, this incident led to several exchanges temporarily suspending withdrawal services on the Solana network, which have now been fully restored.
Matthew Sigel, Director of Digital Asset Research at VanEck, offered his explanation for Solana’s outage yesterday. According to him, the outage may have been caused by issues related to the Berkeley Packet Filter loader (BPF loader). The BPF loader is a critical mechanism used for deploying upgrades and executing programs on Solana.
The problem seems to have originated from a previous Solana improvement proposal (0093), which modified some functionalities of the BPF loader, including preventing the use of unnecessary metadata in BPF. The bug introduced during this upgrade was discovered on the testnet and although a fix was already available, it had not been implemented yet due to still being in the testing phase. Some speculate that this error may have been triggered intentionally, resulting in the Solana network’s outage.
Furthermore, Sigel expressed confidence that Solana will not encounter the same issue again. He believes that this outage event was caused by specific problems arising from Solana’s experimental nature and ongoing development process, and he believes that solutions for this issue are already being developed.
On the other hand, Sigel expressed concerns about the potential aftermath following the network restart. He expects a surge in DeFi activities once the network is back online, as arbitrage bots will seek to capitalize on all available arbitrage opportunities. Some estimate that these opportunities could reach a maximum extractable value (MEV) of up to $25 million, which could potentially lead to another outage.
Additionally, this situation may slow down the pace of innovation on Solana, as future Solana Improvement Proposals (SMIPs) will undergo more rigorous discussions. These discussions may include reforms to the fee market, which could serve as an indicator of this dynamic.
Following the Solana network outage yesterday, the price of SOL dropped by nearly 4% from around $96 to a low of $92.88. Perhaps with the network back to normal operation at around 11 p.m., the SOL price rebounded to pre-outage levels and further increased.
However, the upward trend could not be sustained as of press time, with SOL price temporarily reporting $95.31, a slight decrease of 0.44% in the past 24 hours.