Sui Foundation Implements Major Upgrade After Recent Blockchain Outages

The Sui Foundation has announced a significant upgrade to the Sui Network following three outages that left the blockchain inactive for over 15 hours across two days. According to Cointelegraph, the outages occurred on Thursday and Friday, with the first lasting nearly six hours, followed by two more outages on Friday, lasting eight hours and 25 minutes and 43 minutes, respectively. As of Monday, all systems are operational. In a blog post on Sunday, the Sui Foundation detailed the upgrade aimed at resolving the bugs responsible for the outages. The foundation highlighted areas for improvement, including enhanced failure containment, end-of-epoch resilience, and further investment in artificial intelligence agents. These agents played a crucial role in diagnosing issues, querying validator logs, and assembling metrics. The foundation assured that validators have addressed the known issues related to the original gas-charging bug and the randomness-state bug, allowing network activity to resume without any risk to user funds or reversal of committed transactions. The Sui Network has faced similar challenges in the past, with an outage in January lasting over six hours and another incident in November 2024, where validators were stuck in a crash loop for approximately 2.5 hours. Currently, Sui ranks as the 13th-largest blockchain by total value locked, hosting 137 protocols with a total value of $519 million, according to DefiLlama. The recent outages were attributed to "crash bugs" introduced during the 1.72 software release, affecting gas charging and causing the network to charge funds before canceling transactions due to insufficient balances. This led to negative balances that crashed the system. An interim fix for the initial bug inadvertently triggered the third outage, as it had a low probability of causing a halt. The Sui (SUI) token has experienced a decline since the outages, trading at approximately 99 cents before the first outage on Thursday, according to CoinGecko data. It has since dropped around 11%, currently valued at about 88 cents as of Monday. In early May, the token saw a 50% increase to $1.41 following positive developments, including 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 swiftly enough for mainstream financial institutions.