Avalanche confirms block finalization stall
Quick Take
- Avalanche has confirmed a block finalization stall, preventing blocks from being accepted on the primary network.
- The last block on the Avalanche C-Chain appears to have been more than an hour ago, according to on-chain data.
Avalanche 
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has confirmed a block finalization stall, preventing blocks from being accepted on the primary network, with developers currently investigating.
“Developers across the community are currently investigating a stall in block finalization that is preventing blocks from being accepted on the Primary Network.” Avalanche stated in an incident report at 6:30 a.m. ET.
Data from an Avalanche blockchain explorer shows that the last block on the Avalanche subnets (P-Chain, X-Chain and C-Chain) appears to have been more than an hour ago, coinciding with the alert.
"The issue seems to be a gossip-related mempool management bug, which is purely a code-related bug, and not an issue with performance handling," Kevin Sekniqi, co-founder of Avalanche developer Ava Labs, later clarified, having previously suggested the incident seemed to relate to a new wave of inscriptions. "Inscriptions seem to have hit the edge case, but inscriptions did not affect performance," he added.
Avalanche updated the incident report at 11 a.m. ET, stating "Avalanche Validators provision a stake-weighted bandwidth allocation for each peer and this buggy logic led to each node saturating their allocation with useless transaction gossip. This dynamic prevented pull queries issued by the validator from being processed in a timely manner and led to consensus stalling (as no polls were being handled)."
The team requested validators to update their nodes to AvalancheGo v1.11.1 to address the issue. "As soon as a sufficient amount of stake upgrades to this release, consensus should return to normal," it said.
At 11:36 a.m. ET Avalanche said that block finalization on the primary network was resuming and the team was monitoring stability. The team finally confirmed the incident had been resolved at 12:43 p.m. ET — some six hours after the outage began.
Prior Avalanche outages
Prior to today, there was a brief outage in March 2023, affecting subnets C-chain and X-Chain.
On Feb. 1, block ingestion on Avalanche was delayed due to an issue with an infrastructure provider, though it did not affect the performance or stability of the Avalanche network or any Subnets, the team said at the time.
Layer 1 blockchain competitor Solana also suffered an outage earlier this month following a series of such incidents during 2022.
Updated with additional details throughout.
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