Solana outage history

Why Solana went down

Solana chases speed with large, fast blocks and a single global state. When traffic spikes, especially from bots during token or NFT launches, validators can run out of memory or fall out of sync. A halted Solana network cannot recover on its own; validators must agree on a restart point and upgrade together.

Over time, fixes such as QUIC networking, stake weighted quality of service and local fee markets reduced how much spam could crowd out normal traffic. After February 2024, the network went much longer without a full halt.

Other incidents

Beyond the four marked below, there were several shorter halts and slowdowns, including in January 2022 and on June 1, 2022 (about four and a half hours, a durable nonce bug) and September 30, 2022 (a misconfigured validator). Solana's status page lists them all.