Sui Network Faces First Major Outage, Recovers after Two Hours

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As an analyst with extensive experience in the blockchain industry, I find myself both intrigued and concerned by the recent outages experienced by Sui Network and ZetaChain. While it is normal for new technologies to encounter challenges during their early stages, these incidents highlight the need for robustness and resilience, particularly in a competitive landscape where trust and reliability are paramount.

On November 21st, there was a substantial interruption that affected the Sui Network, a decentralized blockchain similar to Solana in terms of its sophisticated smart contract functions.

The event that stopped block creation for more than two hours was the initial significant interruption on our main network and raised concerns about its durability and ability to scale in the cutthroat blockchain market, sparking queries about these aspects.

Unprecedented Downtime

At exactly 9:15 AM UTC, production of blocks came to a halt, as reported by SuiVision, the blockchain’s network explorer. This halt in production meant that all transactions ceased, causing the entire blockchain to become inactive for more than two hours.

As a concerned crypto investor, I came across an inconvenience with the Sui network, which they later confirmed through social media. They admitted to a temporary outage, yet offered comforting words that the problem had been pinpointed and a solution was actively being developed.

Based on the report from the organization, the issue was traced back to an error in the system responsible for scheduling transactions. This glitch led validator nodes to fail, making the network unusable. The organization praised the quick action of its validator community who promptly applied a solution, enabling the network to restart producing blocks within two hours.

As an analyst, I’d rephrase it as follows: Upon further investigation, I’ve found that the problem stems from a denial-of-service (DoS) vulnerability caused by an integer overflow in the network’s nodes, according to ExVul’s findings. They also drew attention to a solution on GitHub, a patch designed to rectify this uncovered flaw in our system.

The sudden downtime of the Sui blockchain led to a noticeable impact on its native cryptocurrency. Its value plummeted by almost 11%, reaching around $3.40, but rebounded to $3.60 once the network resumed operations.

The network also led several major exchanges, including South Korea’s Upbit, temporarily suspended SUI-related transactions.

Not the First

As a researcher looking back on recent events, I’ve noticed that our mainnet encountered its first major outage this time around, yet similar hurdles surfaced during testnet operations earlier this year. In March, we experienced extended downtime on the testnet, and another incident occurred in June. Moreover, we faced operational difficulties with public RPC nodes in July; however, they were back up and running smoothly again within 1.5 hours.

Tim Kravchunovsky, the founder and CEO of Chirp – a decentralized telecom network built on Sui, accepted the incident as something routine or commonplace.

He pointed out that the purpose of any blockchain is to prevent such occurrences entirely, however, there are times when interruptions, similar to occasional internet disconnections, cannot be avoided.

Additionally, it’s important to note that Sui isn’t the only blockchain experiencing network issues lately. On November 1, Coinspeaker reported that ZetaChain, a layer-1 blockchain focused on improving interoperability, had an outage lasting six hours in October before it started producing blocks.

The power outage that started approximately at 11:53 PM UTC on Thursday was found to be due to a technical problem. As reported by the ZetaChain team, the interruption originated from a consensus breakdown resulting from the application of a new update to a specific group of validators.

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2024-11-21 18:03