The Solana network is back online after a 5-hour outage triggering the liquidation of $2 million Lon

On Tuesday February 6, Solana (SOL) experienced significant outage, adding to the growing list of problems it has faced over the past 24 months.

Solana's mainnet-beta experienced an outage of nearly 5 hours, which caused concern in the crypto community.

The problem was initially discovered when block explorers Solscan and OKLink indicated a lack of new transactions on the network. The ongoing disruption has caused South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Upbit to temporarily suspend deposits and withdrawals for SOL and several other tokens, as Bitcoin Magazine reported.

Solana was forced to pause all block production on February 6 after the network went offline. The incident contributed to $2.07 million worth of Long positions being liquidated in the past 24 hours. Open interest (OI) also decreased by about $10 million, from $1.36 billion to $1.35 billion between February 5 and 6.


Liquidation of SOL. Source: Coinglass

Solana Blockchain upgraded and rebooted

Solana's team acknowledged the outage via an incident report, confirming the outage but declining to reveal specifics about its cause.

According to the latest update on this issue, to resolve the situation, an upgrade to v1.17.20 was deployed, followed by a restart of the cluster by validator operators, successfully resuming production. block export on mainnet-beta at 14:57 UTC

Although the exact cause of the incident has not yet been revealed, key Solana contributors have initiated an in-depth investigation to determine its root cause.

The aim is to produce a comprehensive report that sheds light on the incident and provides insights into the preventative measures that will be taken to avoid similar disruptions in the future.

VanEck Head of Research, Mathew Sigel, attributed the outage to the failure of the “Berkeley Packet Filter” mechanism to deploy upgrades and execute programs on Solana.

Notably, this incident marks the 11th outage since 2022, with the chronicle of downtimes, forks, and challenges on the Solana blockchain showing extreme downtimes generally lasting many days long.

September 14, 2021: a DDoS attack causes network downtime for 17 hours and 12 minutes.
January 6 – 8, 2022: The alleged DDoS attack lasted several days.
January 10, 2022: A similar DDoS attack.
January 22, 2022: Network down for 29 hours with multiple duplicate transactions causing congestion and outages.
March 28, 2022: RPC nodes forked during upgrade to v1.9.
April 30, 2022: Network was down for 7 hours as millions of NFTs were minted.
May 27, 2022: Block time delayed by up to 30 minutes.
June 1, 2022: Downtime for 5 hours due to a runtime error triggered by the durable nonce transaction feature. To prevent replay, Solana transactions contain a nonce field populated with the “recent” blockhash value. A transaction containing a blockhash that is too old (~2 minutes) will be rejected by the network as invalid. October 1, 2022: Node misconfiguration resulted in data loss, requiring a restart from the previous point, which seemingly wreaked havoc on the entire chain.
February 28, 2023: Approximately 20 hours of downtime as Solana Mainnet undergoes a major fork event.
February 6, 2024: Five-hour downtime due to an error in the Berkley Packet Filter mechanism used to deploy upgrades and execute programs on Solana.

SOL recovers after price decline

Following the recent outage of the Solana blockchain network, the native cryptocurrency token SOL faced a temporary setback with its price falling more than 5% to as low as $92.96. However, the cryptocurrency has managed to regain its previous trading price.

SOL is trading at 97.2 USD, up more than 1.6% over the past 24 hours. It is important to note that prior to the outage, SOL had undergone a significant 9% correction from $106.



SOL price chart. Source: TradingView

With the latest developments, technical analyst Mark Harvey weighed in on the situation, expressing concerns about SOL's long-term viability as an investment.

In a recent post on X (Twitter), Harvey stated:

“Solana is a focused company; a risky asset to hold for the long term. This is the latest disruption in less than a year. Issues like this will limit the upside potential of SOL as no serious applications will be built on the system.”

While Solana has attracted attention for its throughput and scalability, incidents such as recent outages highlight the need to improve stability and reliability.