On Tuesday, the Solana network experienced five hours of unusability. Validators, crucial components of Solana’s infrastructure responsible for processing and validating blockchain transactions, restarted the network before 10 am Eastern Time.

Solana Labs attributed the recent five-hour blockchain downtime on February 6 to a bug that made transactions enter an infinite loop. 

The Post-Mortem

According to a post-mortem report released by Anza co-founder Jeff Washington, a bug in the Just-in-Time (JIT) compilation cache led to repeated recompilations of older programs, monopolizing network resources and causing the blockchain to halt operations. 

In other words, the bug caused an infinite recompile loop in Solana’s transaction process. It affected version 1.17 of Solana’s validator client, so all validators were stalled, as 95% of the cluster stake was on that version.

The fix eliminates the preconditions required to trigger the bug, but Solana Labs stated that there are plans for a more comprehensive fix in the future.

SOL Rises Despite Network Outage

Solana has had at least nine outages since September 2021, totaling over 150 hours of downtime. It’s worth noting the bug was identified during a previous investigation and was flagged to the Solana security team in mid-2022. 

As CryptoPotato reported, the outage sparked criticism from industry experts like Charles Hoskinson and Max Keiser, with the former mocking Solana on Twitter. It also faced criticism for allege