The beginning of May has seen a nearly seven-hour Solana crash, believed to be the result of a bot attack that targeted the company’s NFT minting tool ‘Candy Machine’ and has left users questioning the competence of the blockchain:
Candy Machine Suffers Sugar Hit
A tidal wave of traffic slammed Solana’s ‘Candy Machine’ on April 30. The bots responsible caused four million transaction requests, totalling 100 gigabits of data per second and setting a record for the platform, which could not keep up.
Later that night, the validator operators performed a cluster restart of its Mainnet Beta network. However, it wasn’t fast enough to stop the criticism that echoed around social media from Solana users and onlookers:
Solana’s plans to combat these crashes involve a botting penalty that is soon set to deploy to the program. It will only be the beginning of a broader effort but should work to stabilise the network, hopefully preventing similar issues in the future and stopping Solana from, negatively, being the talk of the town:
Not Solana’s First Outage
Solana has quite the track record of network outages. Notably, on January 4 the network was temporarily down due to a DDoS attack, causing huge transaction delays. Shockingly, this was followed by a second crash within the same week, believed to be a knock-on effect of the first attack.