Sui restores network activity after five-hour mainnet stall triggered by software bug

• Sui restored network operations after a five-hour stall, caused by a crash bug in its 1.72 software release.
• The outage froze transactions and prompted DeFi protocols to pause activity, although no user funds were reported lost or compromised.
• SUI token fell by more than 5% following the incident, marking the network's second major outage in 2026.

Activity on the Sui mainnet resumed late Thursday following a prolonged network stall, with the team confirming in an X post that block production and transaction processing are now back to normal.

The disruption, which lasted more than five hours, was traced to a crash bug in the network's gas charging logic introduced in the 1.72 software release. The issue brought activity on the Layer-1 blockchain to a halt, freezing transaction processing and checkpoint updates across the network.

SUI token drops following network incident

The team first acknowledged the incident earlier in the day, notifying the community that the network was experiencing a stall while engineers worked on a fix. During the outage, blockchain explorers reflected frozen activity, and several decentralized applications, including lending protocols, temporarily suspended deposits and withdrawals as a precautionary measure.

"Sui Mainnet is currently experiencing a network stall. The Sui Core team is actively working on a solution. Be aware that transactions may be paused at this time," Sui previously stated on X.

A detailed postmortem is expected in the coming days. Despite the disruption, there were no reports of user funds being misplaced. The incident marks the second major disruption for Sui this year alone, following a similar multi-hour outage in January linked to consensus-related issues.

Network outages remain a recurring challenge across high-performance blockchain systems. Solana also experienced several high-profile disruptions in the past, including a five-hour halt in February 2024 caused by a Just-in-Time (JIT) compiler bug, as well as earlier incidents tied to spam attacks and validator coordination failures.

Similarly, Polygon faced a multi-hour outage in March 2022 due to a bug in its Heimdall layer, while Ethereum Layer-2 networks such as Linea have also encountered operational interruptions. Even so, the Ethereum mainnet has largely maintained consistent uptime, setting a benchmark for reliability in the sector.

SUI reacted negatively to the outage, declining roughly 5% over the past 24 hours amid broader market weakness and renewed scrutiny around the network's reliability.