Seven-Hour Solana Crash Blamed on Bots Swarming Candy Machine

Solana went dark for nearly seven hours on Saturday—roughly 4:30 p.m. to 11 p.m. EST—after bots appear to have swarmed Candy Machine, an NFT minting tool.

The crash, according to a tweet from Metaplex, was “partially due to botting on the Metaplex Candy Machine program. To combat this, we have merged and will soon deploy a botting penalty to the program as part of a broader effort to stabilize the network.”

Still down more than 5% on the day, to $88.23 as of this writing, according to CoinMarketCap data, Solana had recouped some losses after tumbling to $83.06 during last night’s outage.

Austin Federa, head of comms for Solana, confirmed the crash last night on Twitter: “PSA: Solana mainnet beta fell out of consensus and the validator network couldn’t recover.”

The incident calls to mind a 17-hour outage Solana suffered in September.

A report later issued by the Solana Foundation blamed that “network stall” on “in effect, a denial of service attack.”