Solana blockchain validators restart network after transaction stoppage

The Solana blockchain is back online after an hours-long outage.

As previously reported, Solana's transaction blocks came to a stop on Tuesday. Developers later said that Solana's mainnet "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."

Ultimately, the network's stakeholders moved to execute a restart, a laborious process that played out in the community's Discord channel. The restart path was taken after efforts to stabilize the network proved unworkable. Ultimately, a second restart patch was released to validators, and the successful reactivation occurred in the early hours of Wednesday. 

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Still, the return to service wasn't immediate, as noted by the Solana Foundation: "The Solana validator community successfully completed a restart of Mainnet Beta after an upgrade to 1.6.25. Dapps, block explorers, and supporting systems will recover over the next several hours, at which point full functionality should be restored."

The price of SOL, the network's native token, pared some of Tuesday's losses in the aftermath, rising from a local low of around $146 to a press-time price of roughly $160, according to CoinGecko.  

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