Why Solana Has Had Network Outages, and What's Changed

Solana's pursuit of very high throughput has, at several points, come at the cost of network stability, with multiple full outages during 2021 and 2022 in particular.

What actually caused them

Most outages traced back to resource exhaustion: a flood of transactions (often from bots during token launches or NFT mints) overwhelmed validator memory or consensus messaging faster than the network could process or reject them.

What changed since

Solana's core developers introduced fee markets (local fee prioritization by account, called QUIC and stake-weighted QoS) and moved to reduce reliance on a single feature that could bring down the whole network, along with a shift toward the Firedancer client to diversify validator software away from a single implementation.

The current state

Full-network outages have become markedly less frequent as these fixes have shipped, though the underlying tension between maximizing throughput and guaranteeing uptime under extreme load remains part of Solana's design tradeoff.