Solana’s Latest DDoS Attack Leads to Poor Network Performance

The Solana network experienced an attack towards the end of 2021 that affected its performance for hours. The network has now experienced another incident that is causing degraded performance on the blockchain.

Solana Went Offline for Four Hours on January 4

The Solana network went offline for approximately four hours yesterday, indicating that the blockchain still has some issues to address. Popular blockchain and crypto reporter Wu Blockchain reported that there was an incident that resulted in slow and failed transactions on the Solana network.

Solana went down again at two o'clock in the morning (UTC+8) on January 4th. According to users of the official Telegram community, the attacker is suspected of using spam to conduct a DDoS attack.

— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) January 4, 2022

According to Wu Blockchain, the Solana network went down for roughly four hours yesterday as a result of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. However, Solana.Status pointed out that the network was fully operational with 100% uptime during the said attack period. Solana.Status is where the real-time and historical data on Solana’s system performance are uploaded.

Solana users on Reddit posted screenshots of failed transactions around the time the network downtime was reported. Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase provided an incident report that shows that poor performance of the Solana network resulted in failed withdrawals of SOL on its platforms.

However, Solana Labs co-founder Yakovenko stated that the network issues were not a result of a DDoS attack. Instead, it is the pain involved in getting a new runtime commercialized.

Solana Experienced Two Major Outages in 2021

Last year, the Solana network experienced two major outages caused by DDoS attacks. On September 21, Solana experienced a 17-hour outage caused by a DDoS attack aimed at Grape Protocol’s initial DEX offering (IDO).

On December 10, Solana suffered another DDoS attack, but the network remained online throughout the period. Solana-based nonfungible token platform Blockasset noticed the DDoS attack after it experienced a delay in its token distribution process.

SOL, the native token of the Solana ecosystem, is down more than 1.7% over the past 24 hours. At press time, SOL is trading at $168.33 per token. The technical indicators show that SOL is currently underperforming.

SOL is trading below its 50-day moving average price of $192. The MACD line has been below the neutral zone since last month’s attack, indicating that the bears are still in control. The 14-day relative strength index of 37 shows that SOL is currently facing selling pressure.

If the bearish sentiment grows stronger, SOL could lose its first major support level at $156 over the coming hours. Unless there is a massive sell-off, SOL should stay above the $140 support level in the coming hours and days.