Solana's network was down again on Saturday, for seven hours, when bots hit NFT minting tool Candy Machine, leading to ~4M transaction requests per second
Somehow, on the day I started writing a crypto newsletter, I got hacked. Jay Zhuang / CryptoPotato : Millions of NFT Transactions Clogged Solana, Causing Another Network Outage Macauley Peterson / Blockworks : NFT Buying Frenzies Disrupt Solana and Ethereum Blockchains Ali Raza / Inside Bitcoins : Solana experiences its seventh outage caused by NFT minting bots Arianne Gift / Micky : Solana seven-hour outage explained Chai w/ DeFi ☕ : Crypto news of the week!! 📰 — $ETH gas fees Slaps! — If you were trying … Anushsamal / Bitcoinist.com : Why Solana Faced Outage For The Seventh Time Jesse Coghlan / TradingBTC.com : Solana suffers 7th outage in 2022 as bots invade the network Nellius Irene / Cryptopolitan : Solana bounces back online after seven-hour outage as NFT demand grows Bhushan Akolkar / Coinspeaker : Blockchain Network Solana Down for 7 Hours Amid Invasion by Bots Crispus Nyaga / CoinJournal : Solana price prediction for May 2022: Worrying pattern forms Web3 is going just great : Solana goes down again Tweets: @yugalabs : We wanted to say a few words about the mint tonight. 🧵 @metaplex : Today #Solana mainnet-beta went down partially due to botting on the Metaplex Candy Machine program. To combat this, we have merged and will soon deploy a botting penalty to the program as part of a broader effort to stabilize the network. https://github.com/... @solanastatus : Validator operators successfully completed a cluster restart of Mainnet Beta at 3:00 AM UTC, following a roughly 7 hour outage after the network failed to reach consensus. Network operators an dapps will continue to restore client services over the next several hours. https://twitter.com/... @solanastatus : Solana Mainnet Beta lost consensus after an enormous amount of inbound transactions (4m per second) flooded the network, surpassing 100gbps. Engineers are still investigating why the network was unable to recover, and validator operators prepare for a restart. Hudson Jameson / @hudsonjameson : Correction: Solana Foundation did not write the instructions. It was written by multiple validator operator entities...which is worse (see this thread). https://twitter.com/... Hudson Jameson / @hudsonjameson : Oh fuck. Solana Foundation published beta cluster restart instructions that include instructions to block NFT minting bots manually at the L1 layer. 🫣 “Don't forget, only censor the network until it looks steady again so we can start saving face with an online network.” https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/... @web3isgreat : Solana goes down again April 30, 2022 https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ ... https://twitter.com/... @pseudotheos : At this point Solana should start posting business hours Sam Callahan / @samcallah : From Solana's website: “Solana is a decentralized blockchain built to enable scalable, user-friendly apps for the world.” This is false advertising. Full stop. https://twitter.com/... Lyn Alden / @lynaldencontact : “Prepare for a restart” doesn't sound very decentralized. https://twitter.com/... @phantom : Until the Solana network is operational again, you will have difficulty completing transactions, and in some cases seeing your balances. https://twitter.com/... Camila Campton / @camilacampton : Just try turning it on and off! 🤣 Solana is NOT decentralized. Full stop. https://twitter.com/... @altcoingordon : Solana devs making sure nothing goes wrong with their blockchain https://twitter.com/... @carnage4life : There isn't enough money in the world to move the traffic of a moderately sized web 2.0 app to the Ethereum network. Based on yesterday's gas prices it would cost a quadrillion or quintillion dollars to move Twitter to the Ethereum network. Solana would just fall apart. https://twitter.com/... @carnage4life : The only thing more ridiculous than Ethereum gas fees getting into thousands of dollars due to a surge of traffic from the Yuga Labs NFT land sale is that Solana was down for 7 hours yesterday due to traffic issues. Blockchains aren't designed to scale. https://www.coindesk.com/... @vechainw : I swear, $SOL investors are the new $XRP investors. Decentralized my ass, you guys, really. 🤪 https://www.coindesk.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Solana had already recovered from a 17-hour network-exhaustion outage in 2021, and DeFi traders reported renewed instability in January 2022. The latest failure ties that reliability problem to a specific application-layer traffic source: automated NFT mints through Metaplex Candy Machine.
The immediate response is operational as well as technical: validator operators restarted the beta cluster, while Metaplex planned a botting penalty for Candy Machine. That makes the episode a test of whether application-level controls can protect shared network capacity.
First-order effects
- Solana users and applications lost access during the roughly seven-hour consensus failure, while validator operators had to coordinate a cluster restart to restore the network.
- Metaplex is set to alter Candy Machine with a botting penalty, directly raising the cost or friction of automated minting attempts that flooded the network.
Second-order effects
- NFT projects using Candy Machine must account for bot defenses as part of a launch, rather than treating mint demand as traffic the network will absorb automatically.
- DeFi traders, already affected by earlier Solana instability, face another reliability risk during periods when NFT activity competes for the same network resources.
Third-order effects
- Repeated outages and later congestion episodes suggest Solana's competitive challenge is not simply attracting high-volume activity, but governing how automated demand consumes a shared settlement layer.
- If application-specific penalties become the main safeguard, network reliability will increasingly depend on the policies and engineering choices of major ecosystem programs such as Metaplex.
The trend: High-throughput blockchains are being pushed toward explicit traffic controls as bot-driven demand exposes the limits of permissionless transaction access.