YEREVAN (CoinChapter.com) – The Solana network was hit by a sudden outage on Feb 6. According to system incident reports, the network validators were unable to process transactions and advance blocks. However, the team has not pinpointed the exact technical reason behind Solana’s halt.
Solana Outage – First in 2024
The team ‘rang the alarm’ early on Feb 6. As mentioned, validators noted a rapid deterioration in the network’s ability to confirm new blocks and settle transfers. According to status dashboards, the Solana network came to a halt at 10:22 UTC.
Notably, the latest outage constituted Solana’s most significant crash since a two-day outage in April 2023. The mentioned episode was triggered by excessive memory consumption that required a complex restart.
The current report status claims that “engineers from across the ecosystem are investigating the [Solana] outage on mainnet-beta.” Thus, CoinChapter will deliver updates with the ongoing developments.
Over the years, Solana has suffered from multiple outages, with at least 11 reported in the two years leading up to February 2024. These incidents have ranged from performance degradation to complete halts in block production.
The outages have prompted discussions within the community and efforts from Solana’s team to address these reliability concerns, including establishing an adversarial team to test the network’s robustness.
In response to ongoing challenges, Solana has released new validator software updates aimed at resolving issues that caused network halts. The latest was in February 2024, when a new software release was prepared to address a cluster issue. Validator operators were asked to upgrade and restart the network, highlighting the active approach to improving network stability.
Meanwhile, has the outage affected the SOL price?
SOL Price Drops 3% Since Outage
As of 14:00 UTC on Feb 6, SOL price slid 3% to just below $94. While it is not uncommon for such outages to affect the SOL price, the latter could drop further in the coming hours.
As seen on the chart below, several past Solana outages have also caused price slides. For example, the ‘blackout’ in September 2021 resulted in a 20% SOL price slide in the subsequent two weeks. In two other outages, in June 2022 and February 2023, Solana token price lost 30% in the same time frame.
If the past is any indication, SOL could continue dropping in the coming week, and the 3% current slide is not the bearish limit. If the drop continues, a likely short-term target for SOL would stand at a previous support of $83, or another 10% lower than the current value.
