The Solana blockchain protocol released a report on the recent outage announcing that operations are recovering after the network went dark for 7 hours.
Related: OpenSea Adds Support for Solana-Based NFTs
On April 30, the Solana blockchain stopped producing new blocks as a result of consensus reaching issues. The network participants started to work to solve the issue and restart operations. Block production started at 03:30 UTC on May 1 and the network runners continued to restore services in the following hours.
The Solana team mentioned that there was a huge traffic, that caused the outage. They added that there’s no evidence of denial of service attack (DoS), but evidence points out that NFT bots attempted to win a new NFT being minted using Solana's minting program Candy Machine.
Solana says as the mint price was fixed, the first user to call the mint got the NFT. Bots sent an enormous number of transactions to win the mint.
Because of the large volume of traffic, validators ran out of memory and crashed causing a consensus stall.Solana has faced outages before, the previous of which took place in September 2021 and lasted 17 hours. The team mentioned that the outage of April 30 has common things with the September case, but this time the network kept functioning although transaction request volumes hit 10,000%. Solana noted that was due to the updates made. The protocol will continue to mitigate further risks.