Chapter · Master Solana
Outages and reliability
Being this fast is hard, and Solana has paid for it. In September 2021 a flood of bot transactions overwhelmed the network and it stopped producing blocks for around 17 hours. More stalls followed through 2022, and a bug caused another halt in early 2024. During a full outage, transactions simply do not go through until validators restart the chain together.
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What this lesson covers
It has gotten better
The team treated outages as bugs to fix, not facts of life. Upgrades added better fee markets, spam controls, and networking that keeps one hot app from clogging everything. Reliability has improved a lot since those early stalls, with far fewer full halts. Still, no fast chain is magic, so a healthy user keeps expectations realistic.
What you get asked
Roughly how many hours did the September 2021 Solana outage last?
The September 2021 outage stopped block production for about 17 hours. It was triggered by a wave of bot transactions that exhausted the network's resources.
What commonly triggered Solana's early outages?
Several outages came from huge bursts of transactions, often bots racing for new token launches, that used up more resources than validators could handle.
What happens to your transactions during a full network outage?
When the network halts, no new blocks are made, so nothing confirms. Your transactions sit unprocessed until validators coordinate a restart.
To recover from a full halt, validators must coordinate and ___ the network together from an agreed point.
A halted Solana chain needs a coordinated restart. Validators agree on the last good state and bring the network back up from there.
The rest of this chapter
A plain-English deep dive into how Solana reaches high speed and low fees, plus the real risks around outages and memecoins.