Sui Network Experiences Two-Hour Outage Due to Transaction Scheduling Bug
Sui Network, a decentralized layer 1 blockchain compared to Solana for its smart contract capabilities, experienced a significant disruption on November 21.
The incident halted block production for over two hours, marking the first major outage on the network's mainnet and raising questions about its resilience and scalability.
Unprecedented Downtime
The outage began at 9:15 AM UTC when block production ceased, as reported by SuiVision, the network's explorer. Transactions were halted, rendering the blockchain non-operational for over two hours.
The Sui Foundation acknowledged the incident via social media, confirming the outage and assuring users that a fix was underway. The issue resulted from a bug in the transaction scheduling logic, which caused validator nodes to crash. The foundation noted the swift response of its validator community, which implemented a solution, allowing block production to resume within two hours.
Web3 security firm ExVul provided additional insights, attributing the issue to a denial-of-service (DoS) vulnerability triggered by an integer overflow in the network’s nodes. A patch addressing this weakness is available on GitHub.
The downtime affected Sui's native cryptocurrency, #SUI, causing its value to drop nearly 11% to around $3.40 before recovering to $3.60 post-restoration. Major exchanges, including South Korea’s Upbit, temporarily suspended SUI-related transactions.
Not the First
While this was Sui's first major outage on its mainnet, similar issues occurred during testnet operations earlier this year. In March, the testnet experienced hours of downtime, followed by another incident in June. Public RPC nodes faced operational challenges in July but were restored within 1.5 hours.
Tim Kravchunovsky, founder and CEO of Chirp, a Sui-based decentralized telecommunications network, described the incident as a normal occurrence, stating that outages are sometimes unavoidable, similar to internet connectivity issues.
Sui is not alone in experiencing network outages; ZetaChain, a layer-1 blockchain designed for interoperability, went offline for six hours on November 1 due to a technical issue stemming from a consensus failure related to a new update applied to some validators.