Summary
- The Sui mainnet faced three outage events between May 28 and 29, leading to over 15 hours of downtime.
- According to the Sui Foundation, user funds were secure during these outages, and no transactions were reversed.
- In the past week, SUI's price has significantly declined, dropping by 18%.
Developers of the Sui network explained the reasons behind the outages that occurred last week, which included three distinct downtime events totaling over 15 hours during a chaotic 48-hour span from Thursday to Friday.
The initial two outages were attributed to crash bugs that arose from conflicts between gas charging logic and Sui release 1.72, which introduced a new address balances feature. This new feature interfered with the existing gas calculation processes, causing validators to stop functioning.
The third outage occurred on Friday afternoon during a scheduled epoch transition, caused by an unrelated, hidden bug affecting how validators maintain randomness state during restarts. This issue, which was separate from the earlier gas-related bugs, further exacerbated the network's reliability problems.
The Sui Foundation acknowledged that the implementation of a temporary fix to quickly restore network functionality involved accepting increased risks, while developers continued to work on a more permanent solution.
Over the last week, the price of SUI has steadily decreased, currently sitting at $0.86, reflecting an 18% decline. The token has continued to fall amid a broader downturn in the cryptocurrency market on Monday, with Bitcoin reaching its lowest price in nearly two months.
This recent incident marks the third significant reliability issue for Sui since its mainnet launch in 2023. Previous outages included a two-hour transaction scheduling bug in November 2024 and a six-hour consensus divergence in January 2026.
The intricate nature of Sui's bugs—covering gas logic interactions and validator state management—highlights the ongoing challenges the industry faces with the risks associated with protocol upgrades at scale.