Sui Developers Explain Causes of Three Network Halts

The Sui Foundation has released a comprehensive report outlining the causes of three significant disruptions to its blockchain mainnet that took place on May 28 and 29. These interruptions were attributed to vulnerabilities identified following an upgrade to software version 1.72.

The initial halt lasted approximately six and a half hours, primarily due to a bug in the new Address Balances feature. This flaw affected the gas fee deduction process, leading to transactions being canceled for insufficient funds while the network continued to process them, resulting in negative balances. Consequently, this caused complications during the validators' reconciliation process.

The second disruption was a direct consequence of a temporary fix applied to address the first issue. The development team recognized that there was a "low probability" of a halt occurring due to the patch but opted to proceed with it to restore blockchain functionality swiftly.

The third outage stemmed from an unrelated, previously unidentified issue. While restarting nodes to implement the final fix, a hidden bug affecting random number generation settings was triggered. This error prevented validators from finalizing essential data and closing the epoch, leading to another network paralysis.

The Sui Foundation reassured users that their funds remained secure and that confirmed transactions were not reversed upon network restoration. All identified issues have been resolved, and the network is now functioning normally.

Additionally, representatives highlighted the successful use of AI agents to enhance diagnostics and gather metrics from validator logs during these incidents.

It is also notable that Sui faced a six-hour outage earlier in January.