Solana network crashes again in early 2023

The SOL network continues to extend the chain of 5 incidents that has lasted since 2022.

The RPC endpoints that help crypto wallets and apps connect to the blockchain have gone offline due to a bug in the 1.14 Solana Validator beta. The announcement from Solana said:

“The mainnet test browser and RPC endpoint are now offline after the RPC software upgrade.”

RPC – “remote function call” is understood as a network engineering model, is a method of communication between two processes, helping programmers to interact easily with the blockchain network.

This incident, unlike previous outages or network outages, did not affect Solana’s ability to generate new blocks. Other RPCs provided by Triton, QuickNode and Alchemy are still working properly.

Austin Federa, head of strategy and communications for the Solana Foundation, added:

“This issue only affects nodes operated by the Solana Foundation. The other nodes are still working fine.”

Unlike the previous times when Solana crashed, SOL tokens were all plugged in. This time, the market’s general uptrend pulled the price of SOL positively up, even growing more than 21% in the last 24 hours and sometimes reaching $16.88.

This is Solana’s first outage in 2023 after having no less than 5 outages in 2022. Most of these outages are usually due to poor resistance to spam bots, causing transaction overload. The most recent incident was when more than 1,000 nodes were disconnected due to being blocked by a cloud service provider, causing over 22% of SOL staking to not receive transaction confirmation rewards. In a rare incident in May 2022, the network was down for 8.5 hours, behind the record of 18 hours in August 2021.