The layer-1 Aptos blockchain network has shared details on a major outage it suffered on its one-year anniversary. The blockchain went down for more than five hours, but transaction load or network capacity did not cause the issue.
On October 20, the Aptos network team shared a post-mortem detailing events that led to a major outage in the same week it celebrated its first birthday.
Aptos Outage Explained
On October 19, the Aptos network delayed transactions at approximately 4:15 PM PDT. The outage lasted for five hours and fifteen minutes but was not caused by a heavy load on the network.
Aptos confirmed that no committed transactions were lost and no fork occurred. It added that,
“Non-deterministic code led to the issue and a fix was deployed.”
It went on to explain that a performance-focused code change was committed to the Aptos-core code base in August. However, this only became apparent after the launch of the “FeeStatement event” on October 16, which revealed disagreements between validators on gas usage.
“Specifically, validators agreed that a transaction had an insufficient gas budget to execute a transaction and they were unable to agree upon the amount of gas used up to that point as a result of the non-determinism introduced in the August code change.”
To resolve the issue, the team identified and reverted the problematic code change. Validators upgraded to the fixed software, allowing them to reach consensus again and restart the chain.
This was the first major delay since the Aptos mainnet launch. It highlights the need for more rigorous testing of edge cases by ecosystem developers when proposing future changes.
Going forward, the team will continue to strengthen its testing infrastructure and processes to reduce bugs from making it to mainnet.
APT Price Outlook
Aptos, along with a number of other layer-1 chains, touted itself as an “Ethereum killer.” The Move language-based blockchain launched in October 2022 following heavy venture capital backing. Moreover, the Aptos team developed the network based on their prior work on Meta’s Diem project.
Its native token, APT, was not impacted by the network outage. It is trading up around 1.2% on the day at $4.93 at the time of writing.
Like most altcoins, APT has been battered in the bear market. It has lost 5.7% over the past fortnight. Additionally, the APT price has also been depressed by regular token unlocks.
Moreover, APT is down 75% from its January 2023 all-time high of just under $20.
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