Solana Drops About 13% After Network Suffers Yet Another Outage

The Solana network suffered an outage for more than four hours, affecting several applications that run on the blockchain as validators could not process transactions.

The SOL token has dropped more than 13% in the last 24 hours as of 1:42 am ET, showed data from CoinMarketCap.

The Solana website and the validator operators had to prepare for a restart, according to a Twitter post from SolanaStatus, which tracks the Solana network.

SolanaStatus posted a set of instructions to help the validators get back on track and confirmed that the network was out for roughly four and a half hours after the network failed to reach consensus.

The Solana network was unable to process new blocks and major DeFi applications went offline and SolanaStatus flagged users moments later at 6 p.m. ET.

Solana's usage blew up in 2020-21 as the blockchain promised that it could handle up to 50,000 transactions per second while Ethereum can only handle 13 transactions per second.

Many people started shifting to Solana as the SOL token rose to its all-time high value of $260 on Nov 6, 2021. However, since then the network's popularity has dropped as it has faced several outages these past few months. The Solana blockchain network was unstable for a stretch of nearly 48 hours starting January 22.

Last month, Solana suffered another outage after the "Solana Mainnet Beta lost consensus after an enormous amount of inbound transactions (4m per second) flooded the network, surpassing 100gbps," as per a Twitter post.