Solana Mainnet Beta lost consensus after being flooded with transactions — reportedly 4 million per second and over 100 Gbps — striking the network on Saturday.
Solana validators successfully restarted the proof-of-stake blockchain network after roughly seven hours of downtime, according to an update posted today, May 1.
“Validator operators completed the Mainnet Beta cluster restart at 03:00 UTC after an outage of about seven hours due to the network failing to reach consensus. Network operators and DApps will continue to restore client services over the coming hours.”
This marks the second major outage for Solana, a PoS blockchain that is second only to Ethereum in NFT activity. In September last year the Solana network also went offline for about 17 hours after being overwhelmed by transaction traffic.
Bot sent 4 million transactions per second
According to details shared on Twitter, Solana went offline on Saturday at about 20:00 UTC after a bot flooded the network with some 4 million transactions per second and roughly 100 Gbps of transaction data.
Most of the transactions were associated with Metaplex Candy Machine, an NFT program widely used by new Solana projects to mint tokens.
With such extreme demand on the network, validators eventually could not reach consensus, and block production stopped.
About seven hours later, Solana validators coordinated a restart using instructions published by one of the network’s validators. The restart process was managed through Solana’s Discord channels and the shared Google Doc, where validators ultimately took control at slot 131973970.
Although the network is back online, Solana core developers are still investigating the cause of the outage and why validators could not recover automatically. Metaplex has issued an announcement outlining steps to help “stabilize” the Solana network.
SOL price
On the market, SOL, Solana’s native token, plunged sharply following the incident. SOL/USD fell to a low of $83.19 before recovering slightly after the restart.
The pair is currently trading around $88.56, down roughly 5.6% over the past 24 hours amid broader crypto market selling pressure.