Solana suffers 7th outage in 2022 as bots invade the network

cointelegraph.com:

The Solana (SOL) network suffered a seven-hour outage overnight between April 30 and May 1 due to a large number of transactions from nonfungible token (NFT) minting bots.

A record-breaking 4 million transactions, or 100 gigabits of data per second, congested the network causing validators to be knocked out of consensus resulting in Solana going dark at roughly 8 PM UTC on April 30.

It wasn’t until seven hours later on May 1, 3 AM UTC that validators were able to successfully restart the main network.

Validator operators successfully completed a cluster restart of Mainnet Beta at 3:00 AM UTC, following a roughly 7 hour outage after the network failed to reach consensus. Network operators an dapps will continue to restore client services over the next several hours. https://t.co/ezqEYQYKWl

The bots hoarded a popular application used by Solana NFT projects to launch collections called Candy Machine. In a Twitter post by Metaplex, the company confirmed that traffic from bots on their app was partially to blame for the network crash.

Today #Solana mainnet-beta went down partially due to botting on the Metaplex Candy Machine program. To combat this, we have merged and will soon deploy a botting penalty to the program as part of a broader effort to stabilize the network. https://t.co/QaAZT3VxXz

Metaplex shared it would be implementing a 0.01 SOL or $0.89 charge on wallets that attempt to complete an invalid transaction which the firm said: “is typically done by bots that are blindly trying to mint.”

The outage caused the price of SOL, the blockchain's native coin, to crash by nearly 7% to $84, although trading since has seen prices recover to just over $89.

The most recent outage marks the 7th time this year that Solana has suffered