Cardano Network Quickly Recovers After Brief Node Outage

Cardano network saw a brief outrage on Sunday that was automatically fixed within minutes with no singular root cause determined as of writing time, developers wrote in a GitHub post.

Several developers reported the error on GitHub but said all nodes were restarted automatically.

Block producing nodes were temporarily affected, a Telegram broadcast message shows. Nodes are network stakeholders that maintain and process transactions on any blockchain and are very essential to any network’s upkeep.

“There was a brief period of degradation,” Rick McCracken, a developer building staking tools for Cardano, tweeted. “Most nodes impacted had gracefully recovered. No network restart was required.”

A few hours ago over half of all #Cardano nodes went offline. This is why decentralization matters. pic.twitter.com/NXDVyKy8ep

— Tom Stokes (@eUTxO_pro) January 22, 2023

Blockchain nodes have previously gone offline on networks such as Solana, with one such instance causing the entire Solana network to for over seven hours last May, as CoinDesk reported. In a separate instance in 2021, Solana validators had to restart the network to troubleshoot a network stoppage.

Reasons for node failure can range from an overload of transactional activity to faulty code. However, a quick fix may indicate strong fundamentals for the affected network. The Cardano community is cheering the quick revival, calling it evidence of Cardano being a better blockchain than Solana, which took several hours to restore the network when it faced multiple outages in 2022.

"The real takeaway for me is how impressively resilient the cardano network is. Something took down ~60% of nodes and the network recovered in a few minutes, and continued producing blocks throughout," Pi Lanningham, chief technology officer of Cardano-based decentralized exchange SundaeSwap, tweeted.

Cardano’s native ADA tokens are up nominally in the past 24 hours, CoinDesk data shows.