NEO mainnet down for almost 2 hours, up again now

$NEO, often dubbed as the Chinese version of Ethereum, has been up to some trouble today. Their mainnet was down for almost two hours, and crypto Twitter and Reddit alike have noticed the issue, which is currently solved, although so far there is a lack of explanations from the project as to what caused the downtime.

According to data extracted from NEOscan, the block 3,467,252 took more than 7,000 seconds to mine, when most $NEO blocks are mined in less than one minute. The total downtime of the $NEO blockchain was of 2 hours and 8 minutes, when accounting for the delay experienced between the above-mentioned block and its preceding one:

Read more: What's going on with $NEO in 2019?

Redditor Zzzoem reported the incidence on the CryptoCurrency subreddit. Interestingly, he assures that he had posted the same information before on the $NEO subreddit, but it got deleted there. Indeed, at writing time not a single thread on the subreddit of the almost $600 million-worth project makes reference to the prolonged, abnormal downtime on their mainnet. Some of crypto Twitter has realized:

As $NEO mainnet was down for about two hours, not a single thread about the incident can be found on r/$NEO. Also no word from @$NEO_Blockchain. This is a 900 million dollar network. Good job everyone.

— BD Ratings (@bezantdenier) March 10, 2019

Most commenters on Zzzoem’s thread seemed to be using the chance to criticize $NEO for reasons different to the downtime, although some made some sound claims on that angle and also on the communication policies of the $NEO team:

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However, this redditor came up with a possible explanation of the downtime, which is basically an especulation regarding an update of the $NEO blockchain:

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Read more: $NEO, the Chinese ETH appoints ex-Microsoft executive to lead first US office; 'Bear market is not always a bad thing' says Neo founder Da Hongfei