The Solana blockchain came to a standstill for approximately 5 hours on Tuesday, February 7th, triggering a temporary decline in the price of its native SOL token before validators were able to restart the network.

According to blockchain data, transactions on the leading smart contract platform stopped being processed around 09:52 UTC and did not resume until approximately 15:00 UTC. The outage marked Solana's first major disruption in nearly a year, since an incident on February 25th, 2023.

In the aftermath of the freeze, SOL plunged from around $96 to below $94 before rebounding to erase most of the losses. The coin had hit an all-time high above $260 in November 2021 but has since declined significantly amid the ongoing crypto bear market.

Leading up to the restart, Solana validators worked to upgrade software and generate ledger snapshots to ensure the smooth functioning of the network post-outage. The Solana Foundation attributed the five-hour disruption to a bug that has now been patched in the latest validator software release.

The temporary halt highlights ongoing challenges with uptime and reliability that Solana and other leading blockchains seeking to scale transaction throughput continue to face. However, the quick resolution demonstrates the decentralized network was able to effectively coordinate and recover from the major incident.