Solana suffers another cyber incident, resulting in slow performance

Solana reportedly had a 4-hour outage on January 4, however, Solana.Status showed no problems with the network.

The Solana blockchain suffered its third incident in just a few months, causing network congestion and transaction failures, with users debating whether it was caused by another DDos attack or just a network issue.

The scale and nature of the incident is difficult to determine, with Coinbase, Wu said blockchain and Reddit users all reporting an incident that slowed down the network and failed transactions. However, Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana Labs, denied that there was a DDoS attack this time around.

The latest incident comes less than a month after the previous attack, after reports that the network was disrupted by massive bot activity due to another initial DEX offering (IDO) on Solana-based decentralized exchange platform Radium. blocked.

According to Wu Blockchain, the Solana network was down for about 4 hours in the early hours of January 4 UTC due to an apparent DDoS attack. Solana.Status shows that the network has been fully operational during this period with 100% uptime.

Solana went down again at 2am (UTC+8) on January 4th. Users of the official Telegram community say the attackers are suspected of using spam emails to carry out DDoS attacks.

— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) January 4, 2022

A post in the r/CryptoCurrency section of Reddit yesterday also shared several screenshots of Solana (SOL) users reporting issues with SOL transactions failing before and after potential DDoS and network outages. Coinbase also provided an incident report in the past 24 hours about a “performance drop” on the Solana network that caused withdrawals to fail on the crypto exchange SOL.

"That's why you don't use a service's own status page to draw conclusions, especially if it's masquerading as a decentralized blockchain when it's really just a glorified database," wrote user u/Set1Less.

But other users in the r/Solana community who responded to the r/CryptoCurrency post questioned the validity of these claims, with "NiftyMufti" stating:

"So, instead of randomly echoing other people's opinions, why not show the graph? DDoS attacks and outages show up in block detectors. I don't see any signs of that. Prove me wrong. What time zone is this supposed to be in? When did it happen?"

Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana Labs, tweeted the same earlier today, noting that the network issue has nothing to do with DDoS, just "the pain of commercializing the new runtime."

In an interview with Cointelegraph on Dec. 22, Solana Labs communications director Austin Federa said that developers are currently working to address issues with the network, particularly in improving transaction metering.

“Solana’s runtime is a new design. It doesn’t use EVM [Ethereum Virtual Machine] and has done a lot of innovation to ensure users have the cheapest fees, but there is still work to be done on the runtime,” He said.