Infrastructure operators on the Solana network rushed to repair the ailing blockchain on 25th February after a technical issue limited cryptocurrency trading capabilities, in addition to causing problems with transferring assets, or doing anything else on-chain. According to the Solana Discord server, the blockchain began forking at approximately 00:55 New York time. Shortly after, the validators noticed that their RAM began to grow, while the transaction throughput for the chain plummeted. These technical issues would worsen over time until they effectively halted almost all on-chain activity on the Solana network. As per the data site Solana Explorer, the network was processing just about 93 TPS (Transactions Per Second) by 02:00, which is well below the rate of about 5,000 TPS just 15 minutes earlier. It was a crisis reminiscent of the rocky tech incidents associated with Solana last year, when a series of issues prompted Solana to reform its inbound traffic management. The cause of the most recent incident was unknown at the time, but validator operators and network engineers suspect that a bug in the new version of Solana code was most likely the culprit. Moreover, because there was no definite bug to fix, some validators even began downgrading to the previous version in the hopes of reviving the aforementioned throughput, according to the pseudonymous SolBlaze, who operates a liquid staking pool and is very active in developer circles. Later on, Solana employees began to advocate for the downgrade as well.
