Solana’s NFT minting tool, the ‘Candy Machine’, experienced a number of DDoS attacks on Saturday, April 30th. The network crashed due to NFT minting robots sending requests for over 4 million transactions every second. The outage began on Saturday, at 4:30PM, and ended around 11:00 PM EST.

Investigations into the Cause of Crash are ongoing

Bots raiding Candy Machine are the main reason for this huge flood of transactions. However, Metaplex, the company behind Solana’s NFT solution, explained that the botting of the Candy Machine was only a partial reason for the crash. While the underlying causes of the crash are not yet known, Metaplex has announced that a botting penalty will soon be applied to this application.

In spite of the clarifications, Solana’s developers are still unsure how the bot attack managed to overcome the network’s active safeguards and obstruct consensus. Experts believe that Bot attacks on Solana are more straightforward because of the lower transaction fees than BTC or ETH.

Botting on the Metaplex Candy Machine Program caused today’s #Solana beta to drop partially. We have now merged the two programs and will shortly implement a botting penalty as part of an overall effort to stabilize our network. https://t.co/QaAZT3VxXz

— Metaplex (@metaplex) May 1, 2022

Solana’s Consensus Criticized in the Wake of Repeated Outages

Solana had already received criticism following last September’s 17-hour outage, which led to important changes, such as new and improved code circulating between the validators. However, the network’s latest crash didn’t see any improvements implemented—it simply continued from where it had left off 7 hours prior. Later on Saturday, a cluster restart was successful.

After a nearly 7-hour outage, validation operators completed the cluster restart of Mainnet Beta around 3:00 UTC. This was after the network had failed to reach consensus. Over the coming hours, network operators and dapps will restore clients’ services. https://t.co/ezqEYQYKWl

— Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) May 1, 2022

SOL recovers most of its crash-related deficit

SOL markets fell quickly on Saturday due to the outage. Solana’s native token dropped in value to $83.13 halfway into the system crash, but later recovered to $88.95, resulting in a decrease in price of only 0.3% over the last 24 hours. Still, Solana’s native token (SOL) suffered a 7.7% drop for the week.

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