Root cause is still unknown and under active investigation. This document will be updated as more information becomes available.
At approximately 05:46:16 UTC 2023-02-25, Solana Mainnet Beta suffered a significant performance degradation, eventually leading the validator community to opt for a restart of the network. The cause of this is still unknown and under active investigation. Due to the performance degradation, validator nodes automatically entered vote-only mode, a ‘safe mode’ designed to help the network recover in the event of data unavailability. While consensus was still running, the network was not processing any user transactions. Although the root cause had not been determined at the time, the network was unable to recover without intervention by the validator community. The engineers debugging the issues recommended restarting the network. The validator community collectively agreed and decided to downgrade to the previous stable release, v1.13.6, at the same time to reduce restart risk, as 1.14 had been recently rolled out.
An initial restart attempt was called off to allow time for more thorough data analysis, and ensure no user transactions would be impacted. After further analysis, the community collectively restarted the network using an older slot than the one previously selected. No confirmed user transactions were rolled back or impacted.
At approximately Feb 26, 2023 - 01:28 UTC Solana Mainnet Beta was successfully restarted and the network resumed processing user transactions.
This document will be updated as more information becomes available