After experiencing a four-hour halt in block production due to a software glitch, the Layer-1 blockchain Avalanche resumed operations on Friday. This interruption, caused by a bug, was reported on its status page and block explorer. The network ceased creating blocks at 11:13 UTC, as noted on the status page, which also mentioned that the network’s developers had started addressing the problem. By 15:59, a software update was released for Avalanche nodes, which rectified a flaw causing “an excessive amount of gossip” among validator nodes. Validators, which are distributed globally, operate blockchain nodes, ensuring network security and transaction processing. The update solved an issue where nodes exchanged more information than needed, overburdening the network and causing the outage.
The official Avalanche report stated, “Avalanche Validators allocate bandwidth to each peer based on stake weight, and the flawed logic resulted in nodes overwhelming their bandwidth with unnecessary transaction gossip.” This situation hindered the processing of pull queries by validators, leading to a halt in consensus. Following the software patch, block finalization on the main network recommenced at 16:36 UTC once validators upgraded their software.
Earlier in the day, Kevin Sekniqi, co-founder of Avalanche developer Ava Labs, suggested the problem might be linked to a recent launch of a new inscription wave on Avalanche, occurring an hour before the network went down. Inscriptions enable the recording of arbitrary data on a blockchain without smart contracts, a concept first introduced on Bitcoin, allowing for the minting of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the platform. Sekniqi later clarified that inscriptions were not the primary issue and had no significant impact on performance.
Since the outage, Avalanche’s native token (AVAX) has seen a 3% decline, underperforming compared to the broader CoinDesk CD20 Index, which slightly increased in the same timeframe. This event follows a five-hour downtime experienced by the competing blockchain Solana earlier in the month due to heavy network congestion.
