• There was a 7-hour interruption in the network’s service between April 30th, and May 1.
• The incident led to the discovery that bots had been hoarding the Candy Machine app.
• It is the seventh incident of this kind in Solana’s history.

Seven-hour interruptions occurred in the Solana network (SOL) between April 30th, and May 1, 2017. It was caused by a large number of transactions made from non-fungible token minting bots (NFT).

An astonishing 4 million transactions clogged the network. This caused invalidators to lose consensus. Solana was affected by this outage at around 8 PM UTC (April 30). It was successfully restored at 3:00 AM on May 1.

The incident led to the discovery that bots had hoarded Candy Machine, an application used by Solana NFT project teams to launch collection launches. Metaplex revealed that bot traffic on their application had partly caused the outage.

In a Tweet, Metaplex reacted to the incident by announcing that “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.”

Metaplex announced it would impose a $0.89 or 0.01 SOL fee on wallets trying to make invalid transactions. These transactions are “typically done by bots that are blindly trying to mint.”

This outage caused a drop in the SOL price of 7% to $84. SOL fans are relieved to report that the price has recovered fairly well and is back at $89.

Solana has experienced this incident seven times in a row. Between January 6 and January 12 in 2022, Solana experienced partial outages which lasted anywhere between 8 – 18 hours.

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