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Bots Spam ‘Candy Machine’ NFT Minting Tool to Put Solana Out of Action for 7 Hours

May 2, 2022

Saturday saw the Solana blockchain suffer a 7-hour outage after an insane amount of data flooded the proof-of-stake chain, knocking validators out of consensus and grinding block production to a halt.

Although it’s still unclear how the traffic overcame network safeguards, what’s known is that the outage arose after bots had swarmed the NFT minting tool ‘Candy Machine’ earlier in the day. The unprecedented amount of traffic reportedly included 4 million transaction requests and 100 gigabits of data every second. This, according to a company spokesperson, was a network record.

The exact time of the outage was 4:32PM ET, with validators reportedly restarting the cluster at slot 131973970 near 11:00PM. 

In addition, and unlike September’s 17-hour outage, the swarm of bot traffic hasn’t prompted developers to resolve the issue by implementing new-and-improved code. Instead, it has simply picked up where the network had flopped seven hours prior. That being said, restart validators were reported to have debated whether to implement code that would temporarily block Candy Machine transactions, however such idea didn’t pass a vote.

Overall, the outage only saw a brief fall in SOL markets, as its native token crashed to a 24-hour low of $83.13 three hours in, before climbing up again slightly and trading at $86.27 at the time of writing. 

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