The Solana outage was caused by an infinite loop bug previously discovered on devnet.
Solana Labs said the recent outage, which halted blockchain transactions for five hours on February 6, was caused by a bug discovered a week earlier by developers.
Solana Labs released a detailed report on February 9 outlining its investigation into the outage. The report revealed that the known bug had multiple causes and that developers had only deployed a fix for one of them when the outage occurred.
root cause
Previous reports partially confirmed the issue, but the latest report provides a technical reason for the outage and states that “the deploy-remove-request cycle of the legacy loader program caused an infinite recompile loop in the JIT cache.”
Simply put, Solana’s trading process was stuck in an endless loop due to a bug.
The related bug only affected Solana validator client version 1.17, not client version 1.16. However, since 95% of the cluster stake was running 1.17 at the time the affected block occurred, almost all validators were stopped.
Latest reports also indicate that developers identified this bug as the cause of the Solana Devnet outage a week ago. Developers had already patched one possible trigger for the bug when the outage occurred and have since accelerated the release of patches for the second trigger.
The fix is in client version 1.17.20. According to the report, the developers plan to release a more complete fix in the future.
Solana experienced numerous outages
Solana regularly attracted controversy due to frequent service outages in its early days.
According to data from CryptoManiaks, Solana has experienced nine outages since September 2021, resulting in more than 150 hours of downtime, excluding the latest outage this week.
Until recent events, the network had not had an outage for almost a year. The previous outage occurred in February 2023 and lasted 18 hours.
Solana (SOL) price has more than recovered since the most recent incident on February 6th, which caused SOL to hit a 6-day low of $93.75. The token was traded on: $105.46 as of press time; It is up 2.4% in the last 24 hours.
Editor’s note: Solana Labs confirmed details of the outage on its website, but this report was originally written and published by Anza co-founder Jeff Washington, a former engineer at Solana Labs.