- Avalanche blamed the issue on a code-related bug rather than performance handling.
- The outage earned AVAX some negative publicity.
Less than three weeks after Solana’s [SOL] network stall, another popular smart contracts blockchain suffered an outage.
Avalanche goes to snooze
The Avalanche [AVAX] primary network stopped producing blocks for nearly five-and-a-half hours on the 23rd of February, disrupting the flow of transactions. Avalanche developers admitted to the transaction halt at about 11:30 am UTC, according to the blockchain’s status page.
After first attributing the disruption to a “new wave of inscriptions,” Kevin Sekniqi, co-founder of Avalanche creator Ava Labs, confirmed that the problem was due to a code-related bug and was unrelated to performance.
The bug introduced as part the v1.10.18 release in January made Avalanche validators send high amount of useless transaction gossip to each other, resulting in nodes getting unresponsive.
At about 3:59 pm UTC, Avalanche asked its validators to upgrade to v1.11.1 which would fix the aforementioned bug. The team started monitoring thereafter and confirmed the incident’s complete resolution at 5:43 pm UTC.
The incident comes weeks after a block ingestion issue impacted monitoring of the network’s real-time status. Note that this outage did not impact the performance and transaction activity on the chain.
Investigating AVAX’s response
The ecosystem’s native token AVAX dipped slightly on the development, losing 1.12% of its gains in the 24-hour period, according to CoinMarkeCap.
The ninth-largest cryptocurrency was in the middle of a downtrend that has spanned more than a week. The asset plunged more than 10% in the last seven days.
While not conclusive, it was likely that AVAX’s recent 9.5 million unlock exerted downward pressure on the token. During unlocks, market gets inundated with extra supply, which if not met with proportional demand, can result in sharp price declines.
How much are 1,10,100 AVAXs worth today?
The outage earned AVAX some negative publicity as mentions of the coin on popular social groups spiked, as per AMBCrypto’s analysis of Santiment data.
In fact, Avalanche was the seventh-most trending word in the last 24 hours on socials, used in conjunction with keywords such as “network” and “outage”.
Source: Santiment
