Solana Mainnet “Beta” Suffers Instability as Transactions Get Stuck

According to an official announcement, the Solana mainnet beta is currently experiencing intermittent network instability. The issue, which started less than an hour ago, has resulted in several transactions getting stuck, causing users to express concerns across various social media platforms.

Notably, Solana engineers are currently investigating the issue with a fix expected to be implemented as soon as possible.

Solana mainnet-beta is experiencing intermittent instability. This began approximately 45 minutes ago, and engineers are investigating the issue.

— Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) September 14, 2021

Not New

The development comes less than two weeks after Solana experienced a similar situation on September 2, 2021.

Per a Twitter update from the Solana Foundation, the Solana mainnet-beta suffered an intermittent performance degradation that temporarily reduced its network throughput. Interestingly, the network’s technical team did not allow the issue to linger, as a fix was provided an hour after the problem was encountered.

While many would expect Solana (SOL) to maintain a stable platform considering its popularity in recent times, it is worth noting that the project is still identifying all problems that could affect its future performance when it finally rolls out its official main-net version.

For now, the Solana main-net is still in beta mode and will remain so until the developers have added the necessary upgrades to make the main-net function efficient when it finally chooses to release the official main-net version.

What Caused the Network Instability

According to an email statement from the Solana team, the intermittent network instability was caused by a large increase in transaction load. The statement reads:

“Solana Mainnet Beta encountered a large increase in transaction load which peaked at 400,000 TPS. These transactions flooded the transaction processing queue, and the lack of prioritization of network-critical messaging caused the network to start forking.

This forking led to excessive memory consumption, causing some nodes to go offline. Engineers across the ecosystem attempted to stabilize the network, but were unsuccessful.
The validator community elected to coordinate a restart of the network is preparing a new release, and instructions will be posted in Discord.”

Current Situation

After the initial restart failed as a “result of an overflow bug,” the network validators coordinated a second restart which turned out to be successful. Solana’s downtime has now been fixed with all systems fully operational at the time of writing this line.