The Solana smart contract token network experienced a technical glitch on Saturday, February 25, 2023, known as a “major fork event,” where some users transaction failures; Solana’s incident report called it a “cluster instability” and indicated that a coordinated restart was initiated to accelerate block finalization.
The Solana blockchain is dealing with a “major fork event”
At approximately 6:37 UTC on Saturday, the Solana blockchain experienced a functional slowdown, with users reporting significantly slower block finalization, along with several transaction failures. Solblaze, a liquid staking pool, reported that Solana did not completely stop block generation, but that the slowdown was caused by a fork event.
Solblaze stated that “Solana is now up and running”despite a major fork event on the main net-beta and validators slowing down trying to resolve the fork. According to the account, the network is seeing blocks at a rate of about 16 transactions per second. Validator operators and Solana engineers are working together to determine the root cause. Additionally, Solblaze mentionsthat “validators are starting to revert from v1.14 to v1.13.”
A coordinated restart is underway due to an issue with significantly slower finalization of blocks during the upgrade from 1.13 to 1.14.
Validator: please follow these steps https://t.co/L7b3kAFOJS
– Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) February 25, 2023
The Solana Status update site has similar information, calling the issue “cluster instability.” It indicated that Solana engineers were investigating slow root production on the mainnet beta and that a coordinated restart had been initiated “to resolve issues that caused significant delays in block determination during the upgrade from 1.13 to 1.14.”
The Solana Status page has a link to a document that explains how to proceed with the restart to the validator. Basically, the validator was asked to take a snapshot at slot 179526408, modify the validator command line, install the previous version 1.13.6, and restart the validator Solana’s recent issues include multiple block production outages, a reminiscent of the problems the blockchain encountered last year.
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