Sui deploys emergency upgrades after six-hour network outage

After last week’s major six-hour outage, the Sui network has implemented upgrades to its mainnet, deploying version V1.63.3, and upgrading the protocol to version 107.

The Sui Network rolled out protocol upgrades that reportedly address the underlying issues that may have triggered the outage Cryptopolitan reported last week, which lasted about 6 hours and stalled about $1 billion in transactions. 

Upgrades to Sui’s protocol and mainnet improvements 

The upgrades primarily include fixes to validator consensus issues that prevented nodes from reaching agreement on rejected transactions, optimized transaction confirmation paths for better efficiency and reliability, ensuring the ability to achieve finality directly and disabling RPC interfaces used by validators for transaction signing and submitting aggregated validator signature transactions.

The project’s team has also made plans for faster detection/recovery mechanisms, better tooling for its operators, and expanded testing of the consensus engine. The team’s focus will remain on enhancing resilience while preserving Sui’s strengths.

What happened to the Sui Network? 

The Sui Network suffered a major outage on January 14, which halted transactions and froze over $1 billion in value on the network. 

The Sui Foundation acknowledged the problem at 3:24 pm UTC on X amid reassurances to the users that core developers were working on a fix. 

“The Sui network is now back and fully operational. Transactions are flowing normally. If you continue to experience issues, please refresh your app or browser window. Thanks for your patience,” the Foundation wrote on X, promising a full incident report in the days that followed. 

The team started looking into the problem about 30 minutes before they made the announcement, according to the Foundation. However, the network was not restored for nearly 6 hours afterward. 

The incident was reportedly caused by what the team called a consensus outage, which is a technical issue that prevented the blockchain from confirming transactions. 

It is the network’s second major outage since its origin 

The outage from last week was the second major one the Sui network has faced since it started operating in May 2023. The first real one happened in November 2024 and was linked to challenges that had accrued over time. 

The post-mortem the team later shared identified the root cause as an internal divergence in validator consensus processing, which they say was triggered by an edge-case bug in the consensus commit logic.

Notably, it was not caused by an exploit, network congestion, or timing synchronization issues, and there was no rollback, nor were user funds lost in the process of fixing the issue, thanks to the network’s safety mechanism, which worked as it was designed. 

It is not the first high-speed blockchain to face these struggles. Networks like Solana have faced similar issues in the past, though Solana has since left those behind and has not had any outages in more than one year. This is thanks in part to emergency updates that have allowed validators to communicate more effectively and address critical issues rapidly.

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