After a lengthy, unexplained outage over the weekend due to an update, Solana Labs plans to improve its upgrade process to ensure reliability and uptime
Solana co-founder said last week's 1.14 network update has raised concerns about maintaining stability during major updates.
CoinDeskShaurya Malwa
Context & Ripple Effects
Solana’s reliability record already included a 17-hour outage attributed to network exhaustion in 2021, followed by instability that prompted DeFi traders to complain and a corrective update in early 2022. Later 2022 incidents exposed separate operational failure modes: bot traffic overwhelmed NFT minting, while a consensus bug required validators to disable a feature before restarting the network.
The 1.14 incident makes software releases another explicit reliability risk for Solana Labs, rather than an isolated throughput or consensus problem. That distinction matters because the promised response targets how the network changes, not only how it handles demand.
First-order effects
Solana Labs must revise the upgrade process around major releases, making release reliability and uptime a direct operational responsibility after the 1.14 failure.
Solana users and DeFi traders face renewed uncertainty around major network changes, following earlier trader complaints about instability and outage-driven fixes.
Second-order effects
Validators become a more important checkpoint in Solana’s release and recovery process, since prior consensus failures required them to disable a feature to restore the network.
Applications dependent on Solana must treat upgrade windows as an operating risk alongside traffic spikes, after the network’s bot-driven NFT-minting outage showed that distinct failures can produce the same availability problem.
Third-order effects
If outages continue to arise from traffic, consensus, and upgrades, Solana’s differentiation will depend increasingly on operational discipline across validators and release management, not solely on network performance.
The pattern points to public-blockchain infrastructure maturing around repeatable change-control and recovery practices, with reliability becoming a durable adoption constraint.
The trend: Solana’s outages illustrate a broader shift in blockchain competition toward dependable upgrade and recovery operations as much as raw network capacity.
The root cause of the 2-25-23 outage is still unknown and under active investigation. The following document will be updated as new information becomes available https://solana.com/...
1/Yesterday #Solana had another 20 hour outage 🤯 Just one of about a dozen times the ⛓️ has gone down. But why? 🤔 All part of a massive design flaw that I will try to break down in this 🧵 So let's get into it... https://twitter.com/...
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This situation on ETH is infinitely better than an 19 hour unscheduled outage. It's very worrying to see influential folks in the Solana community saying that liveness is sometimes worth trading off. DeFi doesn't work on a chain that goes down, no matter how low the fees are. htt…
Future network upgrades will include: - Simulated upgrade on testnet - Stress-test while upgrade on testnet There will also be a full adversial team running adversial simulation on small-medium clusters https://twitter.com/...
TL;DR: Devs are working to address issues and improve the release process, including forming an adversarial team and stress-testing testnet before deploying upgrades. Other improvements include firedancer and improving the restart process https://solana.com/...
1/ “Today, there are more than 2,000 developers building thousands of programs on Solana. These developers were attracted to Solana because it lets them build things they can build nowhere else, but those developers also need a stable and predictable foundation.” https://twitter.…
Imagine being like “sorry guys the blockchain is down you can't pay off your mortgage” Yet, some people are unironically bullish on $SOL 😂 https://twitter.com/...