• Solana Blockchain experienced a “large forking event” on Saturday, February 25th, 2023, causing transaction slowdowns and some failures.
• A coordinated restart was launched to accelerate block finalization.
• Validator operators had to follow instructions to take a snapshot at slot 179526408, modify validator command-lines, install version 1.13.6 and then restart the validator.
Solana Blockchain Experiences Technical Glitch
On Saturday, February 25th, 2023 the Solana smart contract token network experienced a technical glitch known as a „large forking event,“ causing transaction slowdowns and some failure for users.
Solana Deals With ‚Large Forking Event‘
At around 6:37 UTC on Saturday, users reported significant slowdown in block finalization and some transaction failures due to the forking event. Liquid staking pool Solblaze stated that while Solana did not completely stop block production, there was a slowdown due to the issue. Validator operators and Solana engineers collaborated to identify the underlying cause of the issue and launched a coordinated restart procedure in order to resolve it.
Restart Procedure
Validators were required to take a snapshot at slot 179526408, modify validator command-lines, install the previous version 1.13.6, and then restart the validator in order for block finalization to speed up again. This is similar to issues encountered by the blockchain last year resulting in multiple block production outages.
Similar Issues Last Year
The Solana Status update website referred to the issue as „cluster instability“ indicating that Solana engineers are investigating slow root production on mainnet beta and that they had launched a coordinated restart procedure in order to address it successfully.
Conclusion
Solana has been experiencing technical issues since last year but this time around they have managed successfully launch a coordinated restart procedure which should help them resolve their current issues with transactions slowing down or failing altogether due their recent large forking event occurring on Saturday February 25th 2023