NAIROBI (CoinChapter.com)—The TON Blockchain, which claims to be one of the fastest blockchains in the market, has been down for over four hours. The unexpected outage drew comparisons to Solana, another blockchain whose claim to fame was speed. Interestingly, Solana has also faced similar issues with frequent downtimes.
TON Outage Triggered by DOGS Token Airdrop
Following the airdrop of DOGS—a new memecoin associated with the Telegram community—the TON blockchain went down. The network faced an “abnormal load,” causing multiple validators to lose consensus and halting block production.
To resolve the issue, the foundation instructed validators to restart operations at 4:00 am UTC, successfully restoring the network.
During the outage, more than four million users claimed DOGS tokens using the Telegram Wallet app, resulting in 67,000 transactions every second. The network was overloaded with activity, which made it difficult for some validators to clear older transactions.
Even though the network is back up and running normally, the incident highlighted vulnerabilities within the TON blockchain’s infrastructure.
Operations Resume Amid Lingering Concerns
After a restart, the TON blockchain resumed block production, with over 231 million blocks counted at the time of writing. The abrupt outage caused disruptions to the network, stopping transactions and compelling major exchanges, including Bybit and Binance, to restrict withdrawals.
The incident led to a 20% drop in TON’s price over the past week and raised concerns about the network’s reliability.
The TON blockchain’s rapid growth and the success of the DOGS token airdrop, which saw four million users claim tokens via Wallet in Telegram, showcase its popularity.
In addition, the incident’s timing—just days after Pavel Durov’s arrest in France—prompted speculation among certain community members about potential connections between the two incidents.
Wittkopp refuted these rumors, though, saying that the outage was caused by the unanticipated strain on the network caused by the DOGS airdrop.
