Solana attributes major outage to denial-of-service attack targeting DEX offering

The Solana Foundation says bots spammed the Grape Protocol IDO on Raydium with 400,000 transactions per second, bringing the network to its knees. Solana has attributed the 17-hour outage it suffered last week to a denial-of-service attack aimed at Grape Protocol’s Sept. 14 initial DEX offering (IDO). In a Sept. 21 blog post, the Solana Foundation stated that bots spammed the network as Grape launched its IDO on the Solana-based decentralized exchange (DEX) Raydium at 12:00 UTC last Tuesday.

The botting activity overwhelmed the network with a transaction load of 400,000 per second, with Solana noting that “unbounded growth of the forwarder queues and resource-heavy blocks” resulted in a number of forks being automatically proposed to the network.

The attack caused Solana’s network’s validators to crash after running out of memory. As a result the network went offline for roughly 17 hours during Sept. 14 and Sept. 15. The recovery was led in collaboration between Solana engineers and more than 1,000 validators, with a hard fork being passed after receiving support from 80% of the network’s active stakers.

“This was a coordinated effort by the community, not only in creating a patch, but in getting 80% of the network to come to consensus.” 

The foundation estimates that the network was patched, upgraded, and restored to full functionality within 18 hours of Solana going offline. The post added that the community is still working on providing a detailed “technical post-mortem and root cause analysis report” that will be released in the coming weeks

The price of Solana (SOL) has performed bearishly since posting an all-time high of $213 on Sept. 9. Since then, SOL has pulled back by 39% to change hands for $129 at the time of writing. The retracement followed a meteoric couple of months for SOL, with the token surging 565% since trading for $32 on July 31.