Solana outage was brought on by infinite loop bug beforehand seen on devnet

Solana Labs stated that the latest outage that halted blockchain transactions for 5 hours on Feb. 6 was brought on by a bug builders caught per week earlier.

Solana Labs revealed an in depth report on Feb. 9 outlining its investigation of the outage, which revealed that the recognized bug had a number of triggers, and builders had solely deployed a repair for one in all them when the outage occurred.

Root trigger

Although earlier studies partially recognized the problem, the most recent report supplies a technical cause for the outage and states {that a} “deploy-evict-request cycle of a legacy loader program triggered an infinite recompile loop within the JIT cache.”

Merely put, Solana’s transaction course of entered an infinite loop as a consequence of a bug.

The related bug solely affected model 1.17 of Solana’s validator shopper and was not current in model 1.16 of the shopper. Nevertheless, virtually all validators stalled as a result of 95% of the cluster stake was working 1.17 on the time of the affected block.

The most recent report additionally reveals that builders had recognized the bug as the reason for an outage on Solana’s devnet one week earlier. Builders had already patched one potential set off for the bug when the outage occurred and subsequently sped the discharge of a patch for the second set off.

The repair is in model 1.17.20 of the shopper; builders intend to launch a extra full repair sooner or later, in response to the report.

Solana has skilled quite a few outages

Solana has usually attracted controversy for its outages, which occurred often in its earlier days.

In line with information from CryptoManiaks, Solana has skilled 9 outages since September 2021, with over 150 hours of downtime — excluding the most recent outage this week.

Till the most recent incident, the community didn’t have an outage for nearly one 12 months. Its earlier outage occurred in February 2023 and lasted 18 hours.

Solana (SOL) costs have greater than recovered since the newest Feb. 6 incident, which triggered SOL to hit a six-day low of $93.75. The token was buying and selling at $105.46 as of press time, up 2.4% over the previous 24 hours.

Editor’s Observe: Though Solana Labs confirmed the small print of the outage by itself web site, the report was initially authored and revealed by Anza co-founder Jeff Washington — a former engineer at Solana Labs.