The Solana blockchain, known for its robust performance, is currently facing a major outage. The disruption, confirmed by the Solana Status account, has left the network offline for over half an hour, a significant deviation from its typical uninterrupted operation.

As per the official update from Solana Status at 10:22 UTC, the "mainnet-beta" has encountered an outage, prompting engineers across the ecosystem to swiftly identify and address the underlying issue. The Solana blockchain explorer has also confirmed the downtime with a flashing "major outage" label on the mainnet.

Notably, the Solana blockchain, known for its rapid block production time of 400 milliseconds, hasn't produced a block in 2 hours and 29 minutes.

Solana validator Stakewiz reported that developers are actively working on a release containing a fix. Once built and tested, instructions for validators will be released. Validators are currently generating snapshots using their local ledger state to prepare for a restart as core engineers finalize the release.

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Technical Details and Validator Preparation

Validators are working on snapshots for slot 246464040, ensuring consistency in the bank hash at this slot. The impending restart of the Mainnet-Beta cluster will utilize version 1.17.20, with the jito-solana release also available. 

As per reports, the state is consistent, and validators are awaiting final confirmation from core engineers.

According to Stakewiz, validators will process blocks once the cluster restarts (80% of the stake is back online), however, most dapps will not work until RPC providers restart. Solana is now 25% operational, according to the latest reports. 

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Impact on Crypto Exchanges and SOL Tokens

The Solana network outage has immediate repercussions for crypto exchanges, with Upbit announcing the suspension of deposits and withdrawals for Solana-based tokens, including SOL, GMT, Raydium, and Access Protocols (ACS). Solana's SOL tokens have already experienced a 3.66% decline to $94 following the news.

This outage echoes a similar incident in February 2023 when the Solana network faced almost two days of downtime. Notably, this marks the eleventh outage for the Solana blockchain in the two years since its launch.