The Solana network suffered a 7-hour network outage on April 30th from 4:30 pm to 11 pm EST as bots invaded Metaplex’s Candy Machine, an NFT minting tool.
The NFT minting bots apparently sent over 4M transactions per second, generating more than 100 Gbps of traffic causing the network to break down.
Austin Federa, head of communications for Solana, confirmed the outage on Twitter. “PSA: Solana mainnet beta fell out of consensus and the validator network couldn’t recover,” she tweeted. She added that the user funds are completely safe.
According to a tweet from Metaplex, to tackle bot activity they will soon implement a botting penalty as a part of the larger effort to stabilize the network.
Metaplex announced that it will implement a 0.01 SOL ($0.89) penalty for any wallet that tries to execute an invalid transaction, which is often done by bots that are blindly trying to mint.
Solana’s Discord server became a vital nexus for network restoration as some of the members asked the node validators to alert others who may not be aware of the outage.
One of the validators co-ordinating through the Discord shared a document with instructions to the operators, allowing them to restart the cluster at slot 131973970.
In a tweet following the outage, Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko praised the network’s validators for working together so swiftly, tweeting he had been in transit while the turmoil ensued.
This is not the first time this year that Solana has experienced an outage. In January, Solana suffered network congestion issues due to bot activity which lasted for about 48 hours. The problem was fixed with the release and adoption of v1.8.14.
