Ethereum Competitor Avalanche (AVAX) Suffers Five-Hour Network Outage

Prominent layer-1 blockchain and Ethereum (ETH) rival Avalanche (AVAX) has suffered a five-hour network outage.

According to Avalanche data-tracking platform Avalanche Status, the blockchain went through an outage that prevented blocks from being accepted on its primary network.

“Developers across the community are currently investigating a stall in block finalization that is preventing blocks from being accepted on the primary network. Updates will be posted here as the issue is investigated.”

However, the issue has since been resolved as of Friday morning due to an update.

According to Patrick O’Grady, Ava Labs’ vice president of platform engineering, upgrading to AvalancheGo v1.11.1 solved the issue, which was rooted in node validators excessively communicating.

“Please upgrade your node to AvalancheGo to v1.11.1. This release disables logic added in v1.10.18 that led to validators sending an excessive amount of gossip to each other.

Avalanche Validators provision a stake-weighted bandwidth allocation for each peer and this buggy logic led to each node saturating their allocation with useless transaction gossip.

This dynamic prevented pull queries issued by the validator from being processed in a timely manner and led to consensus stalling (as no polls were being handled).”

The outage had little impact on the price of AVAX, which is trading for $35.55 at time of writing, a 1.85% decrease during the last 24 hours.

Earlier this month, Solana (SOL) – another layer-1 competing with ETH – also suffered a five-hour outage, causing crypto exchange UpBit to suspend deposits and withdrawals of both SOL and SOL-based products at the time.

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