Ethereum dodges attack while Solana and Arbitrum suffer outages

Ethereum rival Solana (SOL) is down 15% in 12 hours after suffering a denial of service outage.

At 12:38 pm UTC on September 14, the Twitter account Solana Status announced that Solana’s mainnet beta version has been intermittently unstable for 45 minutes.

Six hours after announcing the event, Solana Status explained that the transaction load increased dramatically to 400,000 transactions per second, overwhelming the network, causing a denial of service, and causing the network to begin forking.

The transaction load of the Solana mainnet beta version has increased significantly, reaching a peak of 400,000 TPS. These transactions flooded the transaction processing queue, and the lack of prioritization of network critical messaging caused the network to start forking.

— SolanaStatus (@SolanaStatus) September 14, 2021

Since Solana's engineers were unable to stabilize the network, its validator community chose to coordinate a restart of the network. Solana's community is currently preparing a new release and further information is expected to be released soon.

The incident shattered confidence in Solana, with the price of SOL dropping 15% in 12 hours. While SOL had retreated from its all-time high of $215 on Sept. 9 to below $175 before the accident, news of the network outage quickly sent the price down to $145.

SOL/USD: CoinGecko

Solana wasn’t the only well-known crypto network to experience an outage on Sept. 14, with Arbitrum One, Ethereum’s second-layer rollup network, reporting that its Sequencer had been offline for about 45 minutes.

No new transactions can be submitted during this time, although Arbitrum One stresses that user funds are "never at risk." Offchain Labs, the Arbitrum One development team, also stressed that its network is still in beta, warning that “at an early stage, further disruptions are possible.”

Haha, what happened today? SOL was offline for a few hours, Arbitrum was down for nearly an hour, Ethereum was attacked (unsuccessfully)

— Lark Davis (@TheCryptoLark) September 15, 2021

The team attributed the outage to a bug that "caused Sequencer to get stuck" after Arbitrum Sequencer received a large number of transactions in a short period of time.

If the day’s events weren’t dramatic enough, there was one more — an unknown entity attempted to attack ethereum, but failed, a failure noted on Twitter by ethereum developer Marius Van Der Wijden.

According to the developer, only a small percentage of Nethermind nodes were tricked into switching to the invalid chain, while all other clients “rejected the invalid long sidechain.” All affected nodes have since reorganized onto the normal chain.

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