Aptos, a blockchain network, encountered a significant outage lasting over five hours on October 18, 2023, as it celebrated its one-year anniversary.

Your energy for Aptos One was so electric, you cut the lights!

The Incident

The Aptos Foundation's decision to celebrate its one-year anniversary with the community drawing platform Graffio.art had initially garnered positive attention, with thousands of users actively participating in creating a collaborative artwork.

However, the unexpected and prolonged network outage disrupted this celebratory event, leading to a temporary drop in the value of the APTOS token.

The blockchain's block explorer, Aptos, indicated that on-chain transactions ceased for the duration of the outage, with the AptoScan block explorer revealing a notable gap of 5 hours and 6 minutes between consecutive blocks.

Typically, blocks on the network are confirmed in less than a second. Additionally, during the shutdown, the transaction fee for Aptos spiked from approximately 0.2 APT (worth around $1) to 1.72 APT (worth $8.58).

The Aptos team took to Twitter to inform users that transactions on the network had been adversely affected and that they were actively working on resolving the issue, and managed to restore the blockchain to its normal operation within a span of five hours.

The Consequences Of The Outage

As a consequence, data revealed a slight drop of 2.2% in the value of APTOS, the native token used for gas payments on the Aptos blockchain.

The Aptos outage raised concerns about the network's performance and reliability. During the outage, transactions came to a halt for a period much longer than typical block confirmation times.

This unusual event has sparked curiosity within the crypto community, prompting questions about the root cause and the effectiveness of Aptos' measures to prevent similar incidents in the future.

What is Aptos?

Launched in October of the previous year, Aptos, a layer-1 platform based on the Move technology, emerged as a spin-off from Meta's (formerly Facebook) crypto project, Libra. To commemorate its first anniversary, the Aptos Foundation introduced a community drawing platform known as Graffio.art.

This platform allowed Aptos wallet users to collaborate in creating a community artwork on a blank canvas. Mohammad Sheikh, co-founder and CEO of Aptos Labs, revealed that approximately 4,000 users were engaged in painting on the online canvas just before the network shutdown.

Reliability and Performance of Blockchain Networks

The Aptos outage underscores the importance of reliability and performance in the ever-evolving crypto landscape.

As blockchain networks continue to mature, their ability to maintain consistent functionality becomes a crucial factor in instilling trust and confidence among users and investors.

The incident raises questions about network's resilience and the effectiveness of measures put in place to mitigate such disruptions.

In a similar vein, on October 19, the Theta Network team disclosed that a recent node upgrade had inadvertently triggered an "edge case bug," leading to a temporary halt in block production on the main chain for several hours.

As the crypto ecosystem continues to expand and evolve, the ability of blockchain networks to guarantee uninterrupted service and swift issue resolution will remain paramount in building and maintaining the trust of their user base.