Solana Network Suffers Another Reported DDoS Attack

Solana’s blockchain reportedly suffered another DDoS attack earlier today, but the network seems to be back in good standing as of now. This appears to be the third similar incident in the past several months.

Solana’s Tryst With DDoS

According to the prominent Chinese journalist Colin Wu, Solana went down on January 4th. The attacker was suspected of leveraging spam to carry on the distributed denial-of-service attack. The network was back online after approximately four hours. A DDoS attack typically overwhelms or clogs the network by sending multiple requests to the victim’s web resource and hinders the platform from running correctly.

Solana went down again at two o’clock in the morning (UTC+8) on January 4th. According to users of the official Telegram community, the attacker is suspected of using spam to conduct a DDoS attack.

— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) January 4, 2022

While no official details confirming the event were divulged by the Solana foundation, this incident is the third in the past six months. Additionally, several accounts on Twitter asserted that Solana suffered a “huge slowdown” instead of an outage. Members of the r/CryptoCurrency subreddit also reported the matter and claimed that the “vulnerability of the system” is a “death knell for serious traders.” The post also reads:

“Blaming it on attackers is just dishonesty. A well-designed blockchain is not supposed to have attackers, it is supposed to keep producing blocks based on the parameters of the network, not take a break because someone spammed transactions.”

Solana’s Technical Woes

As mentioned above, this isn’t the first such instance where Solana was hit by a DDoS attack. The Solana Status reported that the network suffered intermittent instability over 45 minutes in September last year.

During this time, Solana validators were gearing up for a new release before being hit by a 17-hour-outage due to the mass botting activity for an IDO on Solana-based DEX, Raydium. While no funds were lost and Solana returned to full functionality, the entire fiasco attracted some serious criticisms when the developers resorted to restarting the network.

Three months later, the network was reportedly hit by a second DDoS attack even as it remained online throughout. Despite suffering from heavy congestion, co-founder Raj Gokal clarified that there was no DDoS attack. It was the NFT game SolChicks that revealed its Chicks NFT were responsible for the performance issues on the Solana blockchain.