Decentralised Layer 1 Blockchain Sui (SUI) suffered a major setback yesterday, November 21, late at night as its network had an outage. The Solana killer network built for rapid smart contract deployment had to halt production for over 60 minutes because of the outage, causing a dip in its value.
During this time, no blocks could be produced on the Sui blockchain, as revealed by SuiVision. The last block that the network could generate before the outage was at 9:15 UTC. For the next 1 hour, no new blocks were produced until the network was restored.
Crypto industry observers spoke out about this outage highlighting Sui’s aim to oust its biggest competitor Solana, the 4th largest digital asset by market cap.
Crypto YouTuber Ajay Kashyap tweeted “SUI blockchain is down. And they claimed to be a Solana Killer”.
The Sui network downtime affected the native token of the blockchain SUI which witnessed a 11% drop in price. However, the cryptocurrency was still up more than 75% in the last 30 days as it traded at $3.40.
Crypto exchanges like South Korea-based Upbit also suffered a setback due to Sui network outage, as it halted withdrawals and deposits for the token. Traders on the crypto exchange were given network error citations for the Sui deposit halt.
After the outage the Layer 1 blockchain announced a production halt on Twitter. As per the Sui Foundation tweet the network had stopped processing transactions as it suffered an outage.
Crypto cybersecurity firms alleged that a DOS bug in the Sui system was responsible for the network outage.
Web3 security agency ExVul tweeted that their analysis has revealed that the network node happened due to a DOS integer overflow. The location of the DOS bug was allegedly on GitHub and hence a fix patch code was suggested.
The Sui Foundation tweeted that the network is up and processing transactions, some 2 hours after the outage. It thanked Sui validators for their swift work.
The foundation further revealed that the network outage happened due to a bug in transaction scheduling logic which resulted in the validators crashing.
As the Sui blockchain got restored, the token started erasing its daily losses by trading at $3.60. Founder of Sui-based decentralized telecommunications network Chirp, Tim Kravchunovsky said that the blockchain only faced issues on the testnet earlier.
“In March and June 2024, the testnet network went down for a few hours while in July, we saw a few RPC nodes go out, which again was fixed in about 1.5 hours,” Kravchunovsky revealed. He added that this was the first major outage on the Sui network.
Kravchunovsky asked traders to appreciate the short time it has taken to resolve the issue despite this being the first major outage on the Sui blockchain. “We should look at the bigger picture” and not compare it to Solana's 2022 outages.
As of November 22, Sui was up 2.14% in the last 24 hours to trade at $3.54 while its trading volume surged by 6.80% to reach $1.75 billion and its market cap rose to $10.07 billion.