February 16, 2025
Solana Suffers Network Outage in February 2024

The popular proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain — Solana — recently encountered a huge setback, causing a moderate decline in the price of its native token, SOL. 

The Solana network experienced another “major outage” on Tuesday, a few months after the blockchain regained traction. Data on Solana Status showed that the network outage occurred at exactly 10:22 AM UTC on February 6. At the time of writing, no blocks have been produced on the network since then. 

To rectify the unfortunate incident and resume block production, engineers from across the ecosystem quickly began investigating the cause of the Solana mainnet-beta outage.  

Solana Network Outage - February 6, 2024
Source: Solana Status

Solana Mainnet-Beta Cluster Restart

Per a follow-up update, a new validator software release (v.1.17.20), including a patch to address the issue which caused the network outage has been deployed. 

Accordingly, instructions to upgrade to version v.1.17.20 and restart the network have been laid out for Solana mainnet validator operators. 

However, part of the Cluster Restart instruction from Michaelh Laine revealed that “investigations are still underway [and] a consensus on restart has not yet been reached,” at the time of writing. 

SOL drops 4% 

The latest downtime on the leading blockchain has adversely impacted the price action of SOL as negative sentiments continue to spread. Notably, the fifth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap is trading for $93.82 per token at press time. 

This translates to a decline of over 4.5% and 10% in the past 24 hours and seven days, respectively. Despite showing signs of a further decline in the short term, SOL has been in an uptrend since September 2023, rallying above $105 per token on January 30, 2023. 

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