Solana network suffers an outage for the third time in less than six months

• According to Colin Wu, a crypto-journalist, the attacker more likely launched a DDoS attack using spam. 
• In September 2021, Solana also encountered a 17-hour outage triggering a huge sell-off to send its price from $220 to $140 within 24 hours.

Solana blockchain suffered another outage in the early hours of January 4, making it the third time in less than six months. A section of the Solana community links the network outage to simple network failure due to high traffic, while others believe it may be due to a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS attack).

According to Colin Wu, a crypto-journalist, the attacker more likely launched a DDoS attack using spam. 

Solana went down again at two o’clock in the morning (UTC+8) on January 4th. According to users of the official Telegram community, the attacker is suspected of using spam to conduct a DDoS attack.

Though the network was restored after five hours, many users have been very skeptical about future usage. Solana has long been compared to Ethereum as several experts predict it has what it takes to steal a large part of the Ethereum market share. 

A Reddit user who reacted to the news stated that a network that goes down this often will never be able to attract serious traders. Despite the Solana community blaming it on a DDoS attack, the Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko says otherwise. 

It’s not a DDoS, just pain (sic) of getting a new runtime commercialized.

Solana affected by slowdown and downtime last year

Solana prides itself in being the fastest network in the world with an incredible increase in adoption last year. In September 2021, the network also encountered a 17-hour outage triggering a huge sell-off to send its price from $220 to $140 within 24 hours.

Solana Mainnet Beta encountered a large increase in transaction load which peaked at 400,000 TPS. These transactions flooded the transaction processing queue, and lack of prioritization of network-critical messaging caused the network to start forking.

It is worth noting that Solana was not the only crypto network affected by downtime in September last year. Ethereum layer 2-rollup network Arbitrum also suffered a similar fate for 45 minutes. However, they claim user funds were not at risk. 

Just recently, the network was hit by another DDOS attack, slowing the network down, though it did not take it down. This was quickly clarified by the head of communication at Solana Labs, Austin Federa, linking it to large transactions during an Initial Decentralized Exchange Offering (IDO) landing in Solana blocks. This took a large amount of compute power according to him. 

Compute for that kind of transactions was not properly metered by the network, and caused blocks to take much longer to process than the network expected. 

The frequency of slowdowns has been said to be a huge disruption and may cause Dapp makers who may have considered using the Solana network for their products and services to look elsewhere.