The Cardano network faced a temporary outage on January 22nd, which was resolved within minutes, according to a GitHub post by the network’s developers. Although the root cause of the error remains unknown, several developers took to GitHub to report the incident.
Rick McCracken, a developer working on staking tools for Cardano, stated in a tweet that the outage was not a complete network failure. Instead, there was a brief period of degradation that affected some nodes, but most of them recovered gracefully without needing a network restart.
Furthermore, a Telegram broadcast message from IOG SPO Announcements revealed that the incident occurred around 00:09:00 UTC between blocks 8300569 and 8300570.
The message stated that approximately 50% of Cardano nodes disconnected and restarted, which impacted relay and block-producing nodes. However, it appears that edge nodes were not affected by the anomaly.
The developers explained that the anomaly was a transient issue that triggered one of two reactions in the nodes – some disconnected from a peer. In contrast, others threw an exception and restarted. However, the messages clarified that such issues were “considered in the design of the Cardano node and consensus,” and the system behaved as expected.
Solana Vs. Cardano Network’s Outage
Last year was a tumultuous year for the Solana network as it struggled to keep up with the demands placed upon it. Multiple outages occurred, with the worst one lasting a staggering 48 hours.
These interruptions in service were particularly concerning for a protocol that was already dealing with overloads and had significant exposure to the now-bankrupt FTX exchange run by Sam Bankman-Fried.
Despite these challenges, the Cardano community is looking back on the situation with a sense of pride. The network’s quick revival without external intervention is being hailed as a triumph, and the fact that no network restart was required is being viewed as a testament to the robustness of the system.
The outages were a stark reminder of the importance of a decentralized and distributed network, and the Cardano community is determined to continue working to improve the network’s resilience in the face of adversity.
As the Solana network looks to the future, it will be crucial for it to address the root cause of these outages and ensure that its infrastructure is able to handle the demands placed upon it.
It is a lesson for all other blockchain networks and crypto enthusiasts that decentralization and distribution is the key to a robust and resilient network.
Besides this, Tom Stokes, a co-founder of Node Shark and Cardano SPO, reported in a recent tweet that a significant number of listed nodes were affected by a network sync issue.
He provided a chart illustrating the drop in sync from 100% to just above 40% for over 300 reporting nodes. The chart shows that the network sync later recovered to around 87% but did not fully return to its previous level of 100%.
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