Solana Suffers Another Network Outage Because of Bot Traffic
2022.05.02 15:14
Solana Suffers Another Network Outage Because of Bot Traffic
- The Solana network saw a seven-hour outage between April 30 and May 1.
- After the incident, it was found that bots hoarded the Candy Machine application.
- This incident is not a first for Solana as it is already the 7th incident this year.
The Solana (SOL) network saw a seven-hour outage between April 30 and May 1. This was a result of a huge amount of transactions from the non-fungible token (NFT) minting bots.
The network saw an astounding 4 million transactions congesting the network, which caused validators to be knocked out of consensus. This resulted in Solana experiencing an outage from around 8 PM UTC on April 30. The network was successfully restarted at 3 AM on May 1.
After the incident, it was found that bots hoarded the Candy Machine application that is used by Solana NFT projects to launch collections. After this discovery, Metaplex announced that traffic from bots on the application was partially to blame for the network outage.
In a Tweet, Metaplex reacted to the incident by announcing that “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.”
Metaplex also announced that it will be implementing a 0.01 SOL or $0.89 charge on wallets that try to complete invalid transactions. These transactions are “typically done by bots that are blindly trying to mint.”
Unfortunately, this outage had a negative impact on the SOL price as it dropped 7% to $84. To the relief of SOL supporters, the price has seen a pretty good recovery back to $89.
This incident is not a first for Solana as it is already the 7th incident this year. Between January 6 and January 12 in 2022, Solana experienced partial outages which lasted anywhere between 8 – 18 hours.
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