Why The Solana Network Crashed On Tuesday

High-speed blockchain Solana's SOL/USD network suffered a major outage on Tuesday, sending the value of its native token plummeting by more than 15% in under 12 hours.

What Happened: The Solana network announced on its mainnet was experiencing intermittent instability as a result of network exhaustion and its engineers were working towards a resolution.

See Also: Solana Sees Nearly $50M In Weekly Institutional Inflows

Six hours after the 45-minute denial-of-service disruption, Solana Status revealed that the root cause was a large increase in transaction load which peaked at 400,000 transactions per second.

1/ 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.

— Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) September 14, 2021

The flood of transactions caused an unintentional forking of the blockchain which further led to excessive memory consumption. This phenomenon, in turn, caused some nodes to go offline.

“Engineers across the ecosystem attempted to stabilize the network, but were unsuccessful,” according to Solana Status.

After the validator community worked towards restarting the network by preparing a new release system, Solana is now officially back online.

SOL Price Action: Solana’s price dropped to a low of $143 reflecting some amount of investor confidence being shaken by Tuesday’s events.

At the time of writing, the price of SOL had recovered to $160. The coin had a 24-hour trading volume of $6 billion at press time.