Solana ‘only’ down for 5 hours but that was plenty of time for memes
This week, Solana engineers confirmed that the ecosystem’s mainnet suffered its first major outage of 2024.
In an incident report issued on Tuesday, Solana confirmed that “Engineers from across the ecosystem” were investigating an outage and according to blockchain trackers, blocks were last processed at just before 10:00 UTC.
The network was restored within a few hours but that was still long enough for an avalanche of memes to flood social media.
These included users making light of Solana’s misfortune, bitter Ethereum rivalries, and a terribly-timed prediction from Ben Armstrong.
Here are a few of our favorites.
Solana outages are nothing new
Read more: Solana mainnet down almost a year after last major outage
One X (formerly Twitter) user was quick to compare Solana devs’ attempts to keep the blockchain running smoothly to stewards at a football match failing miserably to hold back a pitch invasion. Another compared the troubled network to the famously temperamental McDonald’s ice cream machine.
Solana’s status page claims its last major outage happened in February last year when it went down for 19 hours. Before this, the network failed several times throughout 2022, and in 2021 it went offline for almost 18 hours.
Ethereum maxis gloat
Ethereum maxis — users who devoutly support the Ethereum blockchain — also jumped on the bandwagon and wasted no time in kicking Solana while it was quite literally down.
Proponents of the two blockchains have fostered quite a rivalry over the years with supporters often voicing their opinion that one blockchain will kill the other. The rivalry got so bad that in December, Solana’s co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko posted “Don’t bring back last cycle “eth killer” bs. It’s lame.”
Ben Armstrong’s untimely prediction
As if the former Bitboy needs any more heat, one user pointed out that the day before Solana went down, Armstrong posted a video of himself dressed up as a Sultan gazing into a crystal ball while proclaiming “Solana lives.”
Armstrong recently gave the impression that he would be quitting YouTube, only for it to turn out to be a clickbait video.
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