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The Avalanche blockchain experienced a notable disruption in its proof-of-stake (PoS) network on February 23.
The incident, occurring at 12:02:27 UTC, led to a temporary halt in block production, impacting the network's functionality. Kevin Sekniqi, co-founder of Ava Labs, addressed the situation on social media.
Investigating Avalanche primary network block production issue right now. Seems to be related to a new inscription wave launched about an hour ago.
— Kevin Sekniqi 🔺 (@kevinsekniqi) February 23, 2024
The team is reportedly investigating the disruption, with suspicions initially pointing towards a recently initiated "inscription wave" an hour before the block production issues surfaced. Block inscription involves the creation of new blocks to validate and record transactions on the blockchain.
Brief Standstill in Network Operations
Avalanche's official status page reported a complete halt in block finalization during the disruption, indicating that no new blocks were being accepted by the Primary Network. This pause, lasting around 16 minutes, prompted a response from the development team.
Kevin Sekniqi clarified that the issue was related to a code-related bug, distinct from performance handling problems.
Clarification on this: the issue seems to be a gossip-related mempool management bug, which is purely a code-related bug, and not an issue with performance handling. Inscriptions seem to have hit the edge case, but inscriptions did not affect performance. https://t.co/9cvQSAmTVu
— Kevin Sekniqi 🔺 (@kevinsekniqi) February 23, 2024
The disruption was linked to an "inscription wave," but Sekniqi assured that it did not impact the network's performance despite hitting an edge case.
On March 23, 2023, a similar report was published about Avalanche's halt in block production.
The immediate aftermath of the network downtime affected the market, notably impacting AVAX, Avalanche's native token. Within minutes of the disruption, AVAX's value dropped by over 1.3%, and by over 12% over the week to $36.34.