In an unprecedented event earlier this month, Solana (SOL) experienced a significant outage that lasted five hours. This unexpected outage sparked widespread speculation and concern as it appeared to hinder the protocol's growth trajectory.
Solana Labs, the organization behind the protocol, has published a detailed root cause analysis in line with its commitment to transparency. The report aims to shed light on the key issues causing disruption and the steps taken to resolve them.
Contrary to some claims that the outage may have occurred as a result of a hack, the pause in block production was actually caused by a technical glitch. The official Solana report briefly explained the reason for the network outage in its message as follows:
“An old installer program's deploy-evict-request loop triggered an endless recompile loop in the JIT cache.”
So, in simpler terms: An old program responsible for loading and unloading code caused a glitch in the system that translates code during program execution. This glitch caused the system to get stuck in a never-ending loop of trying to translate the same piece of code over and over again. This was the reason for the Solana outage.
*This is not investment advice.