Why the TON Blockchain Was Offline for More Than 6 Hours

The TON blockchain, which is closely linked to the popular messaging service Telegram, recently experienced a massive outage that left the entire crypto community in uproar.

For a period of more than six hours, no transactions were processed, causing significant disruption to the network. In this blog post, we take a closer look at the events that led to this outage and the response to it.

The failure of TON blockchain: A look at the events

Around midnight on Tuesday night, (August 27th) the TON blockchain suddenly stopped producing new blocks. Tonscan, a blockchain monitoring tool, confirmed the shutdown and showed that no more transactions were being processed. This incident forced major crypto exchanges such as Binance and Bybit to temporarily suspend deposits and withdrawals via the TON blockchain.

The main reason for this sudden outage was an unusually high load on the network, which led to a loss of consensus. “The TON blockchain is currently experiencing a disruption in block production,” said an X-post from TON. The problem was caused by the overload of several validators who were unable to clean the database of old transactions. This caused the consensus on the network to be lost.

Causes and background

A key factor that led to the network becoming congested was an airdrop of the DOGS memecoin. This caused a huge increase in transaction volumes, overwhelming the network. X-user @maverickqe, who claims to be a strategic advisor to the TON Society, explained that many validators’ garbage collection became overloaded, which eventually led to the loss of consensus.

The DOGS memecoin had attracted a lot of attention in the crypto community, especially as the developers planned to expand the token’s utility within the Telegram ecosystem. On Monday, the airdrop of DOGS began, with 81.5% of the fixed supply of 550 billion tokens being distributed to community members. It was reported that six million verified users had requested the airdrop, which explains the high load on the network.

The reactions and consequences

As a result of the outage, the TON network called on validators to restart their nodes to restore consensus. The recovery was scheduled to begin at 6 a.m. on Wednesday. However, at around 6:39 a.m., the TON Status group on Telegram reported that not enough validators had yet restarted their nodes with the correct flags. The developers urged the remaining validators to update their nodes immediately to stabilize the network.

In addition to the technical issues, the situation was aggravated by the recent arrest of Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov by French authorities. This incident sparked a wave of outrage within the Telegram and TON communities. A Telegram mini-app launched a petition for Durov’s release, which has now collected nearly 1.7 million signatures.

Impact on Toncoin

The outage also had an immediate impact on the price of the TON blockchain’s native token, Toncoin. Within 24 hours, Toncoin’s value fell by 2.14% and was last trading at $5.27. This shows how sensitive the market is to technical issues within blockchains, especially when they are as prominent as the TON blockchain.

Conclusion

The six-hour outage of the TON blockchain has shown how vulnerable even large networks can be under unusually high load. The incident highlights the need for more robust solutions to deal with network congestion.

While the blockchain is now producing blocks again, the incident will certainly reverberate in the crypto community for a while and could lead to further discussions about the stability and security of blockchains.

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(Featured image by Crystal Mapes via Unsplash)

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