Ripple restores XRP Ledger after 64-minute outage – What went wrong?

• The XRP Ledger faced an hour-long outage on the 5th of February. 
• Ripple’s CTO noted that the network could have “self-healed.”

Ripple’s blockchain, XRP Ledger, resumed operations after briefly going through a network outage that lasted about 64 minutes on the 5th of February. 

According to Ripple’s CTO, David Schwartz, the disruption was caused by a ‘network drift’ after the validations (block production) failed to be published despite running consensus. 

Schwartz added that only one validator had intervened to restore the network, or maybe the entire network “self-healed.” 

“It looks like, as far as we can tell, only one validator operator manually intervened. It’s still not entirely clear if that solved the problem or the network self-healed.”

Here, by “self-heal,” Schwartz referred to XRP Legder’s ability to seek a starting point for block continuation by a supermajority (more than half of validators agreeing on the decision). 

XRP Ledger wallet services impacted

The disruption briefly affected wallet transactions on the network, as noted by Xaman Wallet, XRP Ledger’s equivalent to Solana’s Phantom wallet. 

Note, however, that despite the failed transactions, Schwartz stated that no assets were lost. 

However, some market analysts, like MartyParty, criticized the blockchain’s slow throughput and wondered whether its native token, XRP, would survive. He said, 

“$XRP goes down at 20 tps. I dont think $XRP will work out.” 

On the price charts, XRP shed 6% during US hours on the 4th of February. At the time of writing, the altcoin struggled to hold above $2.5 and was below key moving averages on the higher time frame.

This reinforced the short-term bearish bias, which would likely worsen if the broader weak sentiment persisted ahead of the US Jobs report on the 7th of February. 

It’s also worth noting that BTC faced price rejection at $100K and retreated lower, which could have weighed on XRP’s momentum and price action as well.