Was Solana Hit By Yet Another Attack?

On Tuesday, Solana was hit by what appears to be a distributed denial-of-service attack, causing transactions to fail on the network, even as co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko denied early reports of the incident. Based on reporting from Colin Wu, it appears that Solana went down at 2 a.m. local time in China, allegedly using spam to perpetrate the attack. The network appears to have been fixed by 7 a.m. local time. The DDoS attack used fake bots to swarm the network and cause failures, but Mr. Yakovenko spoke on behalf of Solana, saying, “There was some congestion due to mismetered transitions,” and continued, “sorry that’s not at all what happened…some users experienced their txs timing out and had to retry.” Just last month, Solana was struck by another outage that was attributed to network clogging after the launch of the Initial Dex Offering for the network. This marks the 3rd attack the network has suffered, but it has not hampered the growth of one of Ethereum’s major competitors. After rising nearly 10,000% in 2021, Solana is currently trading above $168 on dramatically reduced volume and a slight drop in its market cap.