Sui Attributes Recent Network Outages to Gas and Validator Issues

Overview

• The Sui mainnet experienced three significant outages between May 28 and 29, leading to more than 15 hours of total downtime.
• The Sui Foundation assured users that their funds remained secure throughout these incidents, with no transactions being reversed.
• In the past week, the price of SUI has dropped by 18%, currently valued at $0.86.

Last week, the Sui network faced a series of outages, totaling over 15 hours across three separate events within a turbulent 48-hour period. Developers have provided explanations for these disruptions.

The first two outages were linked to crash bugs stemming from conflicts between the newly introduced gas charging logic and Sui's release 1.72, which added a feature for address balances. This new functionality interfered with existing gas calculations, leading to validator failures.

The third outage occurred on Friday during a scheduled epoch transition. This was due to an unrelated bug that affected how validators maintained randomness during restarts, compounding the network's reliability issues.

In response to the outages, the Sui Foundation implemented a temporary fix to restore operations, which carried increased risks while developers work on a more robust solution.

During the past week, SUI's price has been on a downward trend, reflecting an 18% decline amid a wider cryptocurrency market downturn, where Bitcoin also hit its lowest price in nearly two months.

This incident marks the third major reliability challenge for Sui since its mainnet launch in 2023, following a two-hour transaction scheduling bug in November 2024 and a six-hour consensus issue in January 2026. The complex nature of these bugs—pertaining to gas logic and validator state management—underscores the challenges faced by the industry regarding the risks of large-scale protocol upgrades.