Posted on December 10, 2021 at 5:41 PM

DDoS Attack Clogs Solana’s Network, But Its Network Remains Online

Solana’s blockchain was reportedly the victim of a recent distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, which lasted for about 24 hours. However, it seems the attack did not have any major impact on the network as it has remained online throughout.

The Solana chain is being overloaded with DDoS attacks which have clogged the network causing delays,” Solana-based NFT platform, Blockasset, highlighted.

GenesysGo, another Solana-based infrastructure firm, also commented on the matter. It stated that the validator network has been facing serious challenges processing transaction requests. However, the platform attributed the issue to “growing pains” and called for calm while the situation is being addressed.

Several Users Report The Crash, But Solana Is Still Silent

The nature of the attack is still not clear at this stage, and the Solana Foundation is yet to confirm that attack to the public.

At the same time, Status.Solana is still indicating that no attack has been detected and the network is fully operational.

But select accounts on Twitter have confirmed that the platform suffered a global outage. Chief Executive Officer of Verbit, Roy Murphy, stated that the platform crashed and is offline. He added that engineers are looking to reboot the system. “Seriously, you can’t make this shit up!” Roy added.

Another user with id “u/Psilodelic” confirmed in a r/Solana subreddit that Raydium IDOs clog on the Solana network could be the cause of the problem. The user stated that something really should be done about the incessant system failures.

The users added that his biggest fear about the platform is the impact during high-volume activity linked to Raydium IDOs. The user noted that about every single performance problem in the past 6 months has been attributed to the launch of Raydium.

Solana’s Network Remains Online Despite The Attack

A moderator of the Solana Reddit Group, with username “Laine_sa”, responded to the complaint, but did not state categorically whether the recent issue is related to Raydium.

However, he noted that there have been “stop gaps” that have been set to make sure that Solana remains online and does not have any network delay. The moderator said the mechanism has been in place since the previous attack in September.

The moderator added that the stop-gap prioritizes vote transactions to prevent a full crash. However, the moderator noted that there will be additional changes that will compute limits and fees, but there is no quick fix to the issue that can be available in a short time. He noted that the issue is taking precedence and the company is looking to provide a permanent solution.

SOL Price Suffered A Slight Deep Following Attack

According to data from Coingecko, since the news about the DDoS attack broker, Solana’s price has dropped by 6.4% to sit at $182.79 as of press time.

Such impact is probably why the platform has kept mute regarding the attack. However, SOL has not been doing great in the market, which is a result of the pullback experienced across most of the major crypto assets. SOL has shed over 26% over the past 30 days.

Solana’s Network Was Also Attacked In September

This is not the first time the Solana network has had an issue this year. In September, the network suffered another outage that lasted for 17 hours. However, the outage was caused by heavy botting activity for DEX offering on the Raydium, the Solana-based platform.

The DDoS attack in September overwhelmed the Solana network’s distributed nodes, as it caused some of the crashes because of the amount of memory used. The network could not produce blocks. Following the attack and the overload, Solana stated that the downtime was caused by “resource exhaustion.”

The network validators decided to update and restart the network, and ultimately created a hard fork from the last confirmed block.

A distributed denial service (DDoS) attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt network traffic. It is usually carried out using compromised systems as a source of traffic. The targeted network is overloaded with unnecessary traffic that proves to be too much for the network to handle.

In the end, it can prevent the legitimate traffic from reaching its destination and the eventual crash of the overloaded network. DDoS attacks can be very costly to impacted organizations, as they could cause the platform to go offline for a long time. Also, the reputation of the platform suffers after an attack on the network. But in the case of the recent attack on Solana, the network remained online and many users didn’t feel the impact of the attack.