Was Solana Really Brought Down Again By DDoS Attackers This Week?

Solana SOL/USD was hit by an alleged distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on Tuesday, which caused transactions to fail on the network, but the project’s co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko denied such reports.

What Happened: Chinese journalist Colin Wu said on Twitter that Solana went down at 2 a.m. local time. Wu cited the official Telegram community of the project to say that the attacker was suspected to have used spam to conduct a DDoS attack. 

The network was fixed at 7 a.m. (local time) Tuesday and functionality was restored to normal, as per the journalist. 

A DDoS attack is a subclass of a denial of service (DoS) attack and is conducted through multiple connected online devices collectively called a botnet. These botnets are used to overwhelm the target with fake traffic.

Wu’s assertions were countered by Solana’s Yakovenko who tweeted that “There was some congestion due to mis metered transitions.” This caused some users to experience timed-out transactions. 

, sorry that’s not at all what happened. There was some congestion due to mis metered transitions, and some users experienced their txs timing out and had to retry.

— anat◎ly  (@aeyakovenko) January 5, 2022

Last month, Solana was hit by an outage, which was attributed to network clogging caused by the launch of an Initial Dex offering (IDO) on the network, reported Cointelegraph. 

See Also: How To Buy Solana (SOL)

Why It Matters: If indeed Solana suffered a DDoS attack this week, it would be the third time the network has suffered such an event. 

In September, Solana suffered a DDoS attack, which led to the value of the cryptocurrency spiraling downwards. The problem was fixed after the network was rebooted.

Even so, Solana emerged as a potent Ethereum ETH/USD rival in 2021, as the project gained traction due to a surge in popularity of non fungible tokens, decentralized finance, and smart contracts.
SOL rose 9255% in 2021. It is down 5.5% in 2022 so far. At press time, SOL traded 0.7% higher at $168.67. It touched an all-time high of $260.06 in November.

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