Solana Network Proposes Upgrades to Address Recent Outage

Solana, a popular blockchain network, is taking steps to improve its network reliability following a significant outage that occurred on February 25.

This outage lasted close to 20 hours and was the first interruption of service to occur in 2022. However, the network has faced 11 major outages and 3 minor ones, leading to a reputation for poor network reliability.

Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana, stated that last week’s outage was related to the 1.14 network update, which was meant to bring speed and scale improvements. However, the rollout of the update triggered significant network degradation, and the cause is still unknown at this time.

To address the issue, Solana plans to improve its software release process for updates by involving external developers and auditors to hunt for bugs and exploits. They will also form an adversarial team to build additional hooks and instrumentation into the validator code for more thorough testing. Additionally, they will look into simpler and more efficient network restart procedures.

Over the past 12 months, Solana has been working on various initiatives to improve network stability. These include building a second validator client, better tooling, upgrading the network communication protocol to “QUIC,” and improvements to the RPC infrastructure.