Solana blamed ‘Denial of Service Attack’ for its major 17-hour outage


On September 14, Solana, a decentralized blockchain, faced a prolonged outage when its blockchain network remained unavailable for more than 17 hours, after weeks of spectacular gains during which the price of its coin was more than fivefold in value.
The Solana Foundation released an initial post-mortem of the event of
the incident by shedding additional light on the core reason for last week’s
network outage.
During those agonizing 17 hours, the system failure held $11 billion in
investor funds. SOL prices fell 5.06% during the outage, from $171.48 to
$142.86.
According to the Foundation, “the cause of the network stall was a
denial of service attack. At 12:00 UTC, Grape Protocol launched their IDO on
Raydium, and bots generated transactions that flooded the network. These
transactions created a memory overflow, which caused many validators to crash,
forcing the network to slow down and eventually stall. The network went offline
when the validator network could not agree on the current state of the
blockchain, which prevented the network from confirming new blocks".
The outage was caused mostly by resource exhaustion because of
transaction load reaching 400,000 Transactions Per Second (TPS).
A denial-of-service (DoS) attack is a form of cyber-attack that prevents
a legitimate user from gaining access to a computer system or other devices.
There were no funds lost during the 17-hour outage, and the network was
back up and running in less than 24 hours. Its native token SOL has dropped
over 15% in the last seven days after a tremendous surge of about 700% in the
past 30 days. The SOL is currently trading 2% higher.
Solana, which launched in April 2020, is the world's fastest public
blockchain platform and an excellent alternative for new developers of
decentralized apps. It claims to support 50,000 transactions per second and can
facilitate peer-to-peer transactions with its native token.

Pavan A
CBW - External Analyst
INDIA