Solana Blockchain is Live After 5-Hour Outage

The Solana blockchain network is back up after suffering five hours of downtime early Tuesday morning.

"Block production on Solana mainnet beta resumed at 14:57 UTC, following a successful upgrade to v1.17.20 and a restart of the cluster by validator operators," the Solana team said on X. "The outage began at approximately 09:53 UTC, lasting 5 hours."

The outage ranks as the fifth longest in the network's history and marks the eleventh instance of degraded performance in the past two years.

SOL dropped more than 3% during the outage.

Solana's engineering team prepared a new validator software release with a patch to rectify the problem, the team said in a post on X. Validator operators were advised to upgrade and restart the network.

Solana has faced intermittent outages in the past. This series of disruptions has raised concerns among users and investors about the reliability of the Solana network.

The downtime comes amid renewed optimism about the Solana network after the fall of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried last year, who had heavily backed the ecosystem. Since the crash of FTX, SOL has surged by more than 600%.

Solana's team said via X core contributors are working on a root cause report, "which will be made available once complete."

[ CORRECTED on Feb. 2 to reflect Solana had degraded performance, not outages, 11 times in the past two years ]