The cryptocurrency market noted a sudden fall in Stellar Lumens’ [XLM] price, early on May 16. Over an hour, XLM fell by 16.18%. The price of the coin plunged from $0.1622 to $0.1360. However, it soon underwent a correction.

It can be speculated that technical issues with the Stellar network, issues that persisted for two hours, contributed to XLM’s price fall. However, the only people to recognize this problem were validators, tweeted Tim Swanson, Founder of PostOakLabs.

Swanson tweeted,

Breaking: yesterday the Stellar network went down for about 2 hours… only those who run validators noticed it.
No new transactions were added for ~2 hours.
Network stats: https://t.co/eSRYFPjDQi

— Tim Swanson (@ofnumbers) May 16, 2019

He further said that a mass of nodes ‘went down,’ which inadvertently caused a failure in the network. Since the network was not used frequently, the community and many others failed to notice it. A Reddit user, u/cryptobrant, posted on the r/Stellar subreddit about the same. The user added,

“As I understand it, most validators on the network, if not all of them, trust SDF nodes. So that means that SDF validators are needed for the network to reach consensus. They went down (reason?) and the network had to stop.”

The user later updated the post, adding,

“50 minutes after this post, it looks like Network is back :)”

Previously, Stellar underwent an accidental hard fork in December 2014, a development which caused panic in the market. XLM, which is based on Ripple’s Consensus protocol, was widely questioned about its integrity.

Source: Trading view

XLM had barely noted any growth in 2019. However, due to its recent pump, the coin noted a rise of 47.12% in 2019. In January 2019, it was valued at $0.1112. After the pump, the coin’s value reached $0.1636.

The fall of the now-eighth largest coin, caused it to be valued at $0.1435, with a market cap of $2.75 billion. The 24-hour trading volume of the coin was noted to be $709.36 million, with a growth of 19.34% over the day. Over the past seven days, the coin pumped by a massive 53.26%, and continued to grow by 1.78%, at press time.

AMBCrypto has reached out to Stellar Lumens to enquire about the reason behind its network issues. We will update the article as the story develops.