Solana Devs Explain Why the Blockchain Suffered a Seven-hour Outage Last Month

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A huge number of incoming transactions and intense traffic led to the suspension of the Solana network on the night of April 30-May 1, the project developers have said after completing an investigation on the incident.

According to them, the network downtime was linked to the activity of bots competing to mint NFTs released using the Candy Machine tool.

The spam transactions arose from the abandonment of the Dutch auction in favor of selling tokens at a fixed price. This created an incentive for users and bots to send huge numbers of transactions in the hope of getting ahead of the competition.

As a result, the validators ran out of memory and crashed. The total number of forks the validators had to evaluate exceeded their ability to do so automatically. As a result, it became necessary to manually intervene to fix the problem.