Seven-Hour Solana Crash Blamed on Bots Swarming Candy Machine

Solana went dark for nearly seven hours on Saturday—roughly 4:30 pm to 11 pm EST—after bots appear to have swarmed Candy Machine, an NFT minting tool.

The NFT minting bots reportedly submitted more than 4 million transactions a second, generating more than 100 Gbps of traffic that crashed the network.

The outage, according to a tweet from Metaplex, was "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."

Austin Federa, head of comms for Solana, confirmed the crash last night on Twitter: "PSA: Solana mainnet beta fell out of consensus and the validator network couldn't recover."

Later Saturday night, validator operators conducted a cluster restart of Solana’s Mainnet Beta network.

Notably, Solana’s Discord server became a key hub for restoration efforts, as some urged node validators to wake up others who might not be aware of the outage.

Saturday’s outage has led some to question the efficacy of the blockchain, with many including Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson posting memes on social media about the crash.

The incident also calls to mind a 17-hour outage Solana suffered in September. A report later issued by the Solana Foundation blamed that "network stall" on "in effect, a denial of service attack."

After tumbling to $83.06 during last night's outage, Solana, as of this writing, has recouped most of those losses today, down less than 1% at $90.82, according to CoinMarketCap data.