On Wednesday, June 1, the Solana network did not generate new blocks for more than four hours due to a failure to process “long-term untargeted transactions”, resulting in a consensus violation. The developers disabled such a transaction and asked the validators to restart the blockchain.

The validator operators successfully completed the cluster reboot of the Mainnet Beta at 21:00 UTC, after an outage of approximately 4 and a half hours after the network failed to reach consensus. Network operators and applications will continue to restore client services over the next few hours.

— Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) June 1, 2022

Durable transaction nonces are mostly popular with cryptocurrency exchanges. The functionality is designed for token holders using complex auto-signing settings, so they cannot always prepare transactions immediately for recording on the blockchain.

For example, a custodian who signs a transaction from two isolated devices may not have time to complete the job in one block. In this case, a normal operation on the Solana network will not work, but the above function allows you to bypass this limitation and pre-sign offline.

Stakewiz, one of the Solana validators, noted that the problem with such transactions has been known for a long time. According to him, a similar error was already observed on May 28, but did not affect the cluster.

A durable nonce is a way a transaction can be signed offline in advance without requiring a block hash any time soon (expires in two minutes). Recently, usage has increased, especially by exchanges, mainly due to cold storage installations.

— Laine | stakewiz.com (@laine_sa_) June 1, 2022

According to Solana, the network outage was 4 hours and 10 minutes. At the time of writing, the blockchain is stable. At the same time, scanners like Solscan and Solana Beach had problems displaying block release and transaction times – values ​​are displayed with a six-hour delay.

This is because the real-time synchronization of the blockchain that happened last week is broken. However, it was later stated that it was only 30 minutes behind the network’s internal clock.

Anatoly Yakovenko, founder of Solana, emphasized that the development team already has a solution – it will be implemented after testing.

If the average slot time is < 720ms, the clock will speed up. There is a fix that needs to be enabled after some testing that will speed up the clock as long as < 1s.

— T◎lyxNFT, 🇺🇸 (@aeyakovenko) June 1, 2022

Recall that on the night of May 1, 2020, the Solana blockchain suspended operation due to the large number of incoming transactions and heavy traffic.