• Crypto & Funx
• 26 Oct, 2024

Sui experienced its first major mainnet outage, halting operations for over two hours.

The downtime was linked to a bug in transaction scheduling logic, later resolved by the validator community.

SUI price dropped 11% during the incident but recovered after the network resumed operations.

Sui Network, a decentralized layer 1 blockchain often compared to Solana for its advanced smart contract capabilities, experienced a significant disruption on November 21.

The incident, which halted block production for over two hours, marked the first major outage on the network’s mainnet and prompted questions about its resilience and scalability in the competitive blockchain industry.

Unprecedented Downtime

The outage began at 9:15 AM UTC when block production ceased, according to SuiVision, the blockchain’s network explorer. Transactions were halted, leaving the blockchain entirely non-operational for over two hours.

The Sui Foundation later acknowledged the incident via social media, stating that the network was experiencing an outage but reassured users that the issue had been identified and a fix was underway.

According to the foundation, the outage from a bug in the transaction scheduling logic. This flaw caused validator nodes to crash, rendering the network inoperable. The foundation commended the rapid response of its validator community, which swiftly deployed a fix, allowing the network to resume block production within two hours.

Web3 security firm ExVul additional insights, attributing the issue to a denial-of-service (DoS) vulnerability triggered by an integer overflow in the network’s nodes. The firm also highlighted a patch available on GitHub to address the identified weakness.

The downtime had immediate repercussions for Sui , the blockchain’s native cryptocurrency. Its value dropped nearly 11%, falling to approximately $3.40 before recovering to $3.60 once the network was restored.

The network also led several major exchanges, including South Korea’s Upbit, temporarily suspended SUI-related transactions.

After the incident, Coinspeaker received a comment from the spokesperson for the Sui Foundation:

Not the First

While this was Sui’s first major outage on its mainnet, similar issues had occurred during testnet operations earlier this year. In March, the testnet experienced hours of downtime, followed by another incident in June. Additionally, public RPC nodes faced operational challenges in July but were restored within 1.5 hours.

Tim Kravchunovsky, founder and CEO of Chirp, a Sui-based decentralized telecommunications network, acknowledged the incident as a normal occurrence.

“Any blockchain aims to avoid such incidents entirely, but sometimes outages are unavoidable, just like our internet connection occasionally goes down,” he stated.

Meanwhile, Sui is not the only blockchain that recently suffered a network outage. On November 1, Coinspeaker ZetaChain, a layer-1 blockchain designed to enhance interoperability, went offline for six hours in October before it began block production.

The outage, which began around 11:53 p.m. UTC on Thursday, was attributed to a technical issue. According to the ZetaChain team, the disruption stemmed from a consensus failure caused by a new update applied to a subset of validators.