ethereum killer solana network crashes for third time in six months

Solana’s blockchain platform is often touted as a possible alternative to Ethereum.
Scaling issues are common for many blockchain platforms, but Solana has suffered multiple breakdowns in less than six months.
Solana suffered an inadvertent DDoS attack less than a month ago.

The Solana blockchain, which is often touted as a competitor to Ethereum, has suffered an outage for the third time in a matter of months. It’s unclear whether the issue was a simple network failure because of high traffic or whether the network collapsed because of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack by hackers.

“Solana went down again at two o’clock in the morning (UTC+8) on January 4th. According to users of the official Telegram community, the attacker is suspected of using spam to conduct a DDoS attack,”
tweeted crypto journalist Colin Wu. He added that the network returned to normal after five hours, at 7 o’clock on the same day.

Solana went down again at two o’clock in the morning (UTC+8) on January 4th. According to users of the official Tel… https://t.co/MsRPYFSPNc

— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) 1641256947000

Other reports indicate that it took about four hours for the network to come back up. “Another year.. and another episode of Solana going down. Today it went down for a few hours in the early morning Asia time, and it took almost 4 hours to bring it back up. The Solana community blames it on a DDOS attack. Lol,” a post on the
subreddit for Solana said less than a day ago.

There have also been many reports on Twitter, which include everything from just a very slow network to a large DDoS attack that took the whole network down. The Solana Foundation has confirmed none of these yet, though it can’t really deny the fact that the network witnessed slowdown, since the same can be tracked in real time.

Solana Labs co-founder Yakovenko, though, has
tweeted that the issue wasn’t a DDoS attack. “It’s not a DDoS, just pain (sic) of getting a new runtime commercialized,” he wrote.

Why does it matter?

As the Reddit post cited above said, “A network that goes down this often will never be able to attract serious traders.” Solana is often touted as the fastest blockchain network on the planet, though many argue that Algorand is a viable alternative too. Nevertheless, Solana’s adoption has seen a manifold increase in the last year.

This is the third time Solana’s network suffered an attack

Yesterday’s incident came less than a month after a similar slowdown. At the time, the Solana Foundation
attributed the slowdown to an Initial DEX offering (IDO) from Radium, a Solana-based decentralized exchange.

The platform had also suffered a 17-hour outage in September this year, leading the price of its cryptocurrency to fall from $220 to $140 in less than 24 hours. “Solana Mainnet Beta encountered a large increase in transaction load which peaked at 400,000 TPS. These transactions flooded the transaction processing queue, and lack of prioritization of network-critical messaging caused the network to start forking,” the Solana Status Twitter account
tweeted at the time.

Slowdowns in blockchain platforms isn’t particularly new though, and Solana isn’t the only platform that suffers from these either. However, the fact that such slowdowns have happened multiple times in less than six months could bother many decentralized app (Dapp) makers who may have otherwise considered Solana as the medium for their products and services.