Solana Faces Renewed Criticism After 10th Downtime and Bumpy Restart, but Developers Remain Optimistic

Following the initial incident on Feb. 25, Solana resolved the blockchain’s performance degradation after validators decided to restart the network. According to an outage report following more than 24 hours of downtime, Solana developers detailed that the “root cause is still unknown and under active investigation.”

Social Media Mocks Solana’s 10th Downtime, Supporters Defend Project

Solana has faced renewed criticism after the blockchain network experienced its tenth downtime on Feb. 25 and into the following day. The network was widely mocked on social media and forums, including r/cryptocurrency. In one forum thread, a user wrote, “Giving a second chance is one thing I can get behind. An 11th chance, on the other hand, is beyond delusional.” Additionally, people made jokes about the bumpy restart of Solana, and in the Discord server, validators discussed adding their phone numbers to receive text messages about future restarts.

Bitcoin.com News reported on the initial downtime after the Solana Status webpage disclosed there was a problem with ‘cluster instability.’ The incident wasn’t resolved until Feb. 26, 2023, at 2:09 UTC. Some critics called the problem and previous downtime issues a “design flaw,” while others favored shorting solana (SOL). Despite the significant downtime, Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko defended the project, stressing that “Solana wants to be fast and super secure.” Brandon Tucker, the growth lead at Marinade Finance, a Solana-based liquid staking project, said an upcoming upgrade should significantly reduce these outages in the future.

“Chain restarts are never welcome, but it’s not a major setback,” Tucker said in a message sent to Bitcoin.com News. “Indeed, despite the furor, it’s a similar outage to the five others we’ve seen over the last 12-18 months. Ultimately, it’s good to see the validator community rally together on their own accord to initiate the updates and restart the chain in real-time. Solana is attempting to do something that no other chain has done with regard to throughput and decentralization and the path to get there is not straight – especially when it’s already being used by more people than just about any other chain,” the Marinade Finance executive added.