Is Solana Down? Network TPS Drops To 100. Here's a Breakdown for Everyone

In the early hours of today, the Solana network began to suffer from degraded network performance. The network's TPS dropped from around 5000tps to just 100tps around the time of writing. You can check the Solana explorer.

I peeped into the Solana Discord channel to give you a breakdown of what's going on.

WHAT REALLY HAPPENED?

Solana Labs and independent validators are still investigating the root cause. However, the earliest assumption is that the downtime is linked to a recent Solana software upgrade.

The Solana Foundation released Solana 1.14 and encouraged validators to update to it. However, it appears this upgrade featured a bug that engineers didn't discover during testing. Earlier today, majority of validators had upgraded to the new software, and this may have triggered the bug which led to the underperformance.

Just to be clear, the network is not OFFLINE. But it is barely managing to stay online until a fix is found.

WHAT'S THE WAY FORWARD?

Validators have proposed that everyone downgrade to the previous version, which worked just fine. This process is already underway, but Solana has over 3000+ validators, explaining the delay. In my opinion, this is a little bit of downside for running a decentralized POS chain.

Another alternative is for validators to restart the network. This appears to be a last resort option and will only be used perhaps if the network eventually goes offline.

I hope this post gives you a breakdown of what's going on, and yeah, SOL price hasn't reacted too negatively to the news. Investors seem to have gotten used to these kinds of things happening on Solana.