Solana Suffers 5th Outage in 2022, SOL Dives

cryptonews.com:

The Solana (SOL) blockchain suffered its 5th outage of 2022 on Wednesday after the production of new blocks on the network ceased due to a consensus failure.

The blockchain went offline at 16:55 UTC and resumed block production at 21:06 UTC, after more than four hours, according to the official incident report.

Solana's native token SOL plunged during the outage, diving by as much as 14% at one point. At 7:31 UTC, the 9th coin by market capitalization is trading at USD 39.84, down by more than 11% over the past 24 hours and nearly 17% in a week. Notably, the coin is down by 85% compared to its all-time high of USD 259 recorded in November 2021, according to CoinGecko.

Meanwhile, a bug that led to consensus failure was the culprit, according to Solana Status.

"Earlier today a bug in the durable nonce transactions feature led to nondeterminism when nodes generated different results for the same block, which prevented the network from advancing," Solana Status said.

Durable transaction nonces are "a mechanism for getting around the typical short lifetime of a transaction's block hash," according to the official Solana documentation.

A bug in the mechanism caused part of the network to consider a block invalid, preventing a consensus among validators, Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko explained in a tweet.

Meanwhile, according to the Solana uptime tracker, the network has experienced five outages so far this year and a total of seven since September 2021, when it suffered an 18-hours long network outage as the result of a massive increase in transaction load.

Solana's worst outage so far was in early January this year -- this one lasted from January 6 to 12. The network also saw another outage in late January and had a 96.4%