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The Solana smart contract token network experienced a technical glitch on Saturday, February 25, 2023, known as a “large forking event,” causing transaction failures for some users. Solana’s incident report referred to it as “cluster instability” and indicated that a coordinated restart was launched to accelerate block finalization.
On Saturday at about 6:37 UTC, the Solana blockchain experienced reduced functionality, and users reported a significant slowdown in block finalization, along with some transaction failures. Solblaze, the liquid staking pool, reported that while Solana did not completely stop block production, it did experience a slowdown due to a forking event.
Solblaze stated that “Solana is currently operational” despite a large forking event on mainnet-beta that has caused validators to slow down as they attempt to resolve forks. The account said the network was confirming blocks at a rate of about 16 transactions per second. Validator operators and Solana engineers are collaborating to identify the underlying cause. Additionally, Solblaze mentioned that “validators are beginning to revert from v1.14 to v1.13.”
The Solana Status update website contains similar information, referring to the issue as “cluster instability.” It indicated that Solana engineers are investigating slow root production on mainnet beta and that a coordinated restart was launched “to resolve an issue during the upgrade from 1.13 to 1.14 that caused a significant slowdown in block finalization.”
The Solana Status page includes a document link that provides validators with instructions on how to proceed with the restart. Essentially, validators were required to take a snapshot at slot 179526408, modify validator command-lines, install the previous version 1.13.6, and then restart the validator. Solana’s recent issues are reminiscent of the problems the blockchain encountered last year, including multiple block production outages.
