Solana network restarts after outage that lasted five hours

The Layer 1 network Solana has restarted after going dark around five hours earlier. 

"Block production on Solana mainnet beta resumed at 14:57 UTC (9:47  a.m. ET), following a successful upgrade to v1.17.20 and a restart of the cluster by validator operators. Engineers will continue to monitor performance as network operations are restored," the network wrote in an incident report.

"The outage began at approximately 09:53 UTC, lasting 5 hours. Core contributors are working on a root cause report, which will be made available once complete," the report continued. 

The outage

At 10:22 UTC (5:22 a.m. ET), Solana wrote in a network status notice that "engineers from across the ecosystem are investigating an outage on mainnet-beta." 

The disruption caused block progression to halt, meaning transactions couldn't go through, The Block previously reported. 

After around two hours of attempting to fix the matter, Solana Status, a page run by the Solana Foundation, said on the social media platform X that "engineers from across the ecosystem are readying a new validator software release, which includes a patch to address an issue which caused the cluster to halt. Validator operators should prepare for an upgrade and restart of the network."

The last time Solana experienced a "Major Outage" was in February 2023, when the blockchain was down for a few hours. After two restart attempts, the network came back online.