The Sui mainnet faced significant disruptions over the weekend, with three outages occurring on May 28 and 29, linked to a flaw in the blockchain's gas-charging system introduced in the recent v1.72 update. The Sui Foundation's analysis revealed that the new address-balance feature interacted poorly with the network's existing mechanisms, leading to these failures.
Details of the Outages
The first outage began around 7 a.m. PT on May 28 and lasted nearly seven hours. It was caused by a bug that affected how gas was managed for transactions involving both the new feature and traditional coin objects. This resulted in validators crashing due to an underflow error when transactions were canceled due to insufficient funds, yet the gas system still attempted to utilize those funds.
The second outage occurred early on May 29, triggered by a variant of the same bug where a different cancellation reason bypassed the interim fix implemented after the first outage. This led to another failure, which prompted the core development team to apply a more robust solution.
