What Happened During the Outage?
On Monday, the Helium blockchain decided it was time for a little break, pausing its operations for about four hours due to some pesky validator outages caused by a software update. This wasn’t just any update; it was the v1.12.3 upgrade aimed at supporting the shiny new 5G Mobile subnetwork. Unfortunately, it appears not all upgrades go as planned.
The Fallout: Miners and Tokens Left Hanging
While devices chugged along like loyal workhorses, transferring data over the network without a hitch, the miners and their precious token transfers were left in limbo. Talk about being left on read! Miners were anxiously calculating their rewards while their tokens lingered in the digital purgatory.
A Push Forward
The Helium team resorted to an auto-skip feature that didn’t work quite as it should have, ultimately taking matters into their own hands by pushing the blockchain one block forward. Thankfully, this expedited the process and allowed normal functions to resume, proving that sometimes it takes a little human intervention to fix a technical hiccup.
The Consensus Conundrum
At around 10:20 AM EST, block production came to a screeching halt at block height 1435692. The root of the problem? A lack of network consensus, specifically tied to a not-so-fun cocktail of a software glitch and a local network outage affecting a cluster of validators all housed on the same Amazon Web Service (AWS). Note to self: Keep your validators spaced out!
Lessons Learned from the Chaos
The Helium engineers pointed out several key lessons to learn from this fiasco. Firstly, they need to take a closer look at the Friday software updates—maybe no one should be allowed to work on Fridays during a full moon? Secondly, ensuring that validators aren’t all crashed on one network at the same time like a bad party scenario is essential.
To Infinity and Beyond… or Not
Finally, new blocks began to be produced again by 1:45 PM EST, and while the situation was solved, the after-effects were still being felt in the market, with HNT prices plummeting 4.1% in just 24 hours. From a high of $8.76, we can only hope the tokens will soon recover and have their own comeback story! It seems that in the blockchain world, things can change faster than you can say ‘technical difficulties.’
