Tortola, British Virgin Islands, Monday, March 4, 2024 – The Avalanche blockchain, a popular platform for decentralized applications (dApps), came back online at approximately 11:30 AM ET on March 4, 2024, following a five-hour outage that began at 6:30 AM ET the same day. The network stoppage disrupted transactions and applications built on Avalanche. 1
The incident is unusual for Avalanche, with only one minor outage reported since 2020. AVAX, Avalanche’s native currency, experienced a 3.2% decline to approximately $35.60 during the outage.
Initially, the working theory was that it was an “edge case” related to inscriptions.
However, shortly after the outage began, Avalanche’s network status page reported that “developers across the community are currently investigating.”
The disruption was attributed to a gossip-related mempool management bug by Ava Labs co-founder Kevin Sekniqi, clarifying that it was not caused by a network usage spike. 2
During the outage, developers investigated the issue, and the bug was later identified as a consequence of logic added in v1.10.18 leading to excessive gossip among validators.
A new version, 1.11.1, was released, and over a quarter of the network updated, allowing the buggy version percentage to drop to 19%, leading to the network’s restoration.
Sekniqi emphasized that the bug hit the majority of nodes but wasn’t related to the new client version 1.11.
The outage underscores the need for ACP-13 (Subnet-Only Validators) to enhance the Avalanche network’s fault tolerance.
While the initial working theory focused on inscriptions, a feature for creating and managing on-chain data, the exact cause was identified as a client code issue. Developers quickly deployed a fix, and the network resumed normal operations roughly five hours later.
The impact of the outage on the Avalanche ecosystem remains to be fully assessed.
However, the incident is likely to raise questions about the platform’s reliability and scalability as it competes with other blockchain networks.
- Avalanche blockchain: https://blockworks.co/news/avalanche-blockchain-downtime[↩]
- Avalanche blockchain: https://twitter.com/kevinsekniqi/status/1761012545131774099?s=20[↩]
