Sui Foundation deploys critical upgrade following triple network failure
According to the Sui Foundation, the Sui blockchain has rolled out a significant network upgrade designed to resolve software bugs responsible for three separate outages that resulted in more than 15 hours of total downtime last week.
The nonprofit organization responsible for overseeing the Sui Network, the Sui Foundation, has announced the implementation of a "major upgrade" designed to resolve problems that triggered three consecutive outages, resulting in the blockchain being offline for over 15 hours spanning two days.
On Thursday, Sui suffered an initial outage that persisted for close to six hours, followed by two additional disruptions on Friday. The initial Friday outage continued for eight hours and 25 minutes, while the subsequent one lasted 43 minutes, as documented by the Sui network's uptime monitoring dashboard. As of Monday, all network systems are showing operational status.
In a blog post published on Sunday, the Sui Foundation revealed that it had implemented an upgrade to remediate the bugs responsible for the network disruptions. The foundation also identified multiple areas requiring enhancement, including improved failure containment mechanisms, stronger end-of-epoch resilience, and additional investment in artificial intelligence agents that assisted with diagnosis procedures, validator log queries, and metrics compilation.
As of now, validators have fully addressed the known issues caused by both the original gas-charging bug and the randomness-state bug, and network activity has resumed. During the outages, no user funds were at risk, and the network did not revert any committed transactions when it resumed.
Sui Foundation
A comparable outage affected Sui in January, resulting in the network being offline for over six hours. An additional incident took place in November 2024, during which all validators became trapped in a crash loop for approximately 2.5 hours. According to DefiLlama, Sui currently ranks as the 13th-largest blockchain by total value locked, with $519 million, and supports 137 protocols.
Bugs introduced during software update
According to the Sui Foundation, the blockchain's two most recent network failures originated from "crash bugs" that were introduced during its 1.72 software release. These bugs affected the gas charging mechanism, resulting in the network deducting funds before transaction cancellations for insufficient balances could occur. This situation generated negative balances that subsequently crashed the entire system.
A temporary solution for the original bug ended up triggering the third network outage. This interim fix was designed to restore network operations while a permanent resolution could be developed, however it contained "a known issue with a low probability of causing a halt."
The Sui (SUI) token has experienced a decline in value following the outages. According to data from cryptocurrency aggregator CoinGecko, it was trading at approximately 99 cents on Thursday prior to the first outage. Since then, it has fallen roughly 11% and is valued at around 88 cents as of Monday.
During early May, the token surged 50% to reach $1.41 on the back of several positive developments, which included a Nasdaq-listed company staking a significant portion of the supply.
Sui launched its mainnet in May 2023, with the goal of being scalable and capable of processing transactions fast enough for mainstream financial institutions.