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Solana Foundation network outage due to DoS attack

Solana developers posted their network outage analysis last week. The Solana Foundation claims that the stream of junk transactions from the bots was a DoS attack.

After several weeks of upward momentum, during which the SOL price rose more than fivefold, the Solana network faced a major challenge last week. The production of blocks in the main network stopped – a powerful stream of “junk” transactions led to instability and inoperability of the blockchain for 19 hours. Solana developers published a preliminary analysis of this event and revealed the root cause of the failure.

The Solana Foundation confirms in the report the information posted last week on the official Twitter of Solana and Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko. The network was overloaded with a stream of incoming transactions. The developers estimate that the network received up to 400,000 transactions per second.

The flow of transactions began following the launch of the Grape Protocol initial offering of the decentralized exchange (IDO) on the Raydium platform. The network was overwhelmed with transactions generated by bots trying to take part in IDO. Transactions overwhelmed the distributed nodes of the Solana network, causing some of them to crash due to the amount of memory being used.

The network stopped producing blocks when it was unable to reach consensus on the current status of the chain. Last week, the Solana devs initially cited “resource depletion” as the cause of the crash, but in a new report, they have more concretely articulated the problem:

“Basically, a DoS attack was the cause of the network shutdown.”

Although not a traditional DoS attack, the developers believe the end result was similar. As a result, the network validators decided to update and restart the network by performing a hard fork from the last confirmed block. According to Solana’s report, it took 14 hours to coordinate efforts to restart the required 80% of the validators, refresh the nodes, and restart the network.

“Thanks to the validator community, engineers and the entire Solana ecosystem for coming together to solve this problem,” the developers say. “On the rare occasions when such problems arise, it disturbs everyone. When something needs to be fixed in a decentralized network, it’s a real community project. ”

The Solana Foundation plans to release more detailed technical analysis of the outage in the coming weeks with community input.

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