Aptos Hit With 5-Hour Outage on Blockchain's First Birthday

Aptos suffered an outage last night from around 7 pm ET and lasted more than five hours yesterday while hosting a mass drawing application to celebrate its one-year anniversary.

Data from Aptos block explorer Aptos showed that on-chain transactions stopped for about five hours on October 18.

The blockchain explorer AptoScan shows a difference of 5 hours and 6 minutes between two consecutive blocks. Normally, blocks on the network confirm in less than a second.

The blockchain explorer also shows a spike in Aptos’s transaction fee from around 0.2 APT worth around $1 to 1.72 APT worth $8.58 when the shutdown happened.

Launched last October, the Move-based layer-1 platform originated as a spin-off from Meta’s (formerly Facebook) crypto project Libra.

To celebrate its birthday, the Aptos Foundation created a community drawing platform Graffio.art where Aptos wallet users can contribute to a blank canvas to create the community art.

According to its co-founder and CEO of Aptos Labs Mohammad Sheikh, 4,000 users were painting on the online canvas before the shutdown occurred.

However, shortly after Sheikh’s tweet, the Aptos mainnet went down.

The Aptos team notified via Twitter that transactions on the network have been impacted as they worked to resolve the issue. They were able to revive the blockchain in five hours.

Decrypt has reached out to Aptos to learn about the root cause and mitigation steps taken by the team to avoid future occurrences.

Coingecko’s data shows that the value of APT, the native gas-paying token for the blockchain, dropped slightly at 2.2% after the temporary shutdown. But quickly returned to the $5 level.

The token is trading 35.8% lower since its launch last year.

Edited by Liam Kelly.