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Aptos Faces 5-Hour Outage on Blockchain’s First Birthday

Aptos experienced a 5-hour outage during its one-year anniversary celebration, raising concerns about its performance as transactions stopped.

Key Takeaways

  • Aptos blockchain experienced a 5-hour outage during its anniversary celebration.
  • Transactions halted during the downtime, causing concerns about Aptos’ performance.
  • Transaction fees spiked significantly during the outage.
  • Aptos, a Move-based layer-1 platform, had 4,000 users painting on its community drawing platform before the shutdown.

Aptos, the fast-growing layer-1 blockchain network, faced an unexpected setback on its first anniversary celebration. On October 18, the platform experienced a five-hour outage, starting at 7 pm ET, while hosting a mass drawing application as part of its anniversary festivities.

During this downtime, on-chain transactions on Aptos came to a complete halt, raising concerns about the platform’s reliability and performance. Aptos, known for its swift block confirmation times, witnessed a significant deviation, with a 5-hour and 6-minute gap between consecutive blocks, whereas normally, blocks confirm in less than a second.

Notably, transaction fees on the Aptos network also experienced an unusual spike. The fees, which typically hovered around 0.2 APT (approximately $1), surged to 1.72 APT (equivalent to $8.58) during the outage.

Outage Is Rising

Aptos, originally a spin-off from Meta’s crypto project Libra and launched in October the previous year, had planned an innovative way to celebrate its one-year milestone. The Aptos Foundation introduced Graffio.art, a community drawing platform where Aptos wallet users could collectively contribute to a blank canvas to create community art.

According to Mohammad Sheikh, co-founder and CEO of Aptos Labs, around 4,000 users were actively participating in creating art on the online canvas before the unexpected shutdown occurred.

Shortly after Sheikh’s tweet addressing the situation, Aptos’ mainnet went offline. The Aptos team quickly notified the community via Twitter about the network’s disruptions and assured users that they were working diligently to resolve the issue. Fortunately, they managed to restore the blockchain’s functionality within five hours.

Decrypt has reached out to Aptos to gain insights into the root cause of the outage and the mitigation measures taken by the team to prevent such incidents in the future.

To Conclude

The Aptos blockchain outage on its first anniversary is a reminder of the technical challenges that even established blockchain networks can face. While the platform managed to recover swiftly, it highlights the importance of robust infrastructure and thorough testing to maintain uninterrupted services in the fast-paced world of blockchain technology. As Aptos continues to grow and evolve, it will need to address such issues promptly to maintain the trust of its user base and the broader crypto community.