Cardano recovers after over 50% of nodes went down

Recently, Cardano experienced an incident that disconnected over 50% of its nodes, although the primary cause is yet to be determined. All transactions stalled due to the failure of block productions.

Only the block-producing node and Cardano Relay impacted

Cardano’s IOG noted that the anomaly only affected nodes with inbound connections, i.e., active relay nodes and block-producing nodes, as confirmed by Cardano node operators on GitHub. One of the GitHub node operators stated that all their nodes without incoming connections were unaffected.

Last night during the anomaly on the #Cardano network, the entire network did not go down. There was a brief period of degradation. Most nodes impacted had gracefully recovered. No network restart was required. pic.twitter.com/FupQXk2otV

— Rick McCracken DIGI (@RichardMcCrackn) January 22, 2023

Similar headline-making outages have lasted several hours and necessitated the validators coordinating a blockchain network restart to resume operations for platforms like Solana.

Cardano restored the failed nodes swiftly

Cardano network responded quickly to the issue, and most nodes were recovered and running normally without needing external intervention. Most users were amused by how Cardano swiftly handled the anomaly, which also saved the blockchain from experiencing any drastic impacts, as seen with other blockchains in the past.

Tom Stokes, a co-founder of Node Shark, shared a graph that shows the network sync for more than 300 reporting nodes falling from 100% to about 40%.

The 50% momentary degradation of Cardano nodes was caused by an anomaly, based on a post made on the Input-Output Global engineering and research fintech company’s Telegram SPO on Jan. 22.

The post also explained the rapid disruption, stating:

“This appears to have been triggered by a transitory anomaly triggering two reactions in the node, some detached from a peer, and others threw an exception and resumed.”

Additionally, while taking pride in this, IOH stated that “such temporary difficulties” were accounted for in the node design and consensus.