Solana stakeholders were quick to gather the net again after an "insane amount of data" flooded the proof-of-stake circuit Saturday night, pushing validators out of consensus and halting block production.
Bots flooded Candy Machine, a popular tool for mining irreplaceable tokens (NFTs), with an unprecedented stream of incoming traffic earlier Saturday: four million transaction requests and 100 gigabits of data per second - a record for the network, according to one person at the Solana Foundation.
At 4:32 p.m. ET, block production became impossible and the network went dark. Validators restarted the cluster in the 131973970 slot by 23:00 ET, coordinating through Solana's Discord channels and a Google document created by one of the validators.
Anatoly Yakovenko, who was absent through much of the fray, praised the validator community for spearheading the rebuilding of the core network. The Solana co-founder was chastised on Twitter for reportedly "missing in action" amid a network outage.
Unlike previous outages, Saturday's hard fork restart did not result in new and improved code completion in the validators. It simply picked up where the network had left off seven hours before.
Other components of the ecosystem quickly stepped up their defences. At 11:36 p.m. ET, Metaplex, chief infrastructure officer of Solana NFT and a close partner of Candy Machine, announced that a "botting penalty" of 0.01 SOL would soon be implemented to help NFT projects manage excessive traffic.
While Solana's rise to the top tier of Ethereum's main crypto alternatives has been swift, the rush of bots and stability concerns means it hasn't even been the longest stint in recent months.
The digital currency network has been hit by a wave of outages and service interruptions three times in the past year, the latest of which lasted until 6 p.m. in January and angered traders who saw their wallet values plummet until they could sell tokens.
The Solana kernel developers still haven't figured out what went wrong on Saturday or how the alleged botting attempt managed to break consensus despite existing safeguards.