The Web of products (IoT) blockchain Helium shut lower for around 4 hrs on Monday because of validator outages from the software update, causing delayed transaction finality.
Throughout the outage, devices transferring data within the network weren’t affected, but miner rewards and token transfers were left pending. They resolved the problem by skipping the blockchain forward by one block and resuming normal functions.
At 10:20 am EST, the Consensus Group stopped producing blocks at block height 1435692 around the Helium blockchain, according to some status update. Missing network consensus, token transfers couldn’t be completed, and new blocks weren’t being created.
We are back folks. The chain just processed block 1,435,693. We’ll still monitor the chain during the day.
— Helium (@helium) This summer 11, 2022
Helium is definitely an IoT network that utilizes physical radio hotspots to permit users to connect with their devices everywhere there’s radio coverage. Around the Helium network, a Consensus Group includes 43 validator nodes at random selected in fixed times to provide network consensus.
Within the postmortem for that event, Helium engineers reported two reasons validators stopped creating consensus around the network.
First, a problem having a Friday software update for validators led to the issue. The v1.12.3 update is built to provide support for that 5G Mobile subnetwork and it is MOBILE token.
Furthermore, a “local network outage” seemed to be responsible. Within the project’s Discord funnel, Helium moderator Digerati described that the high power of validators at random selected because the Consensus Group during the time of the outage was running on a single Amazon . com Web Service (AWS) network, which experienced technical difficulties.
AWS is really a global cloud-computing and knowledge storage service you can use to boost computer systems like Helium.
Compounding the issue was the failure of the auto-skip feature which should have selected a brand new Consensus Group instantly. They mentioned that “a known issue avoided the car-skip feature from being employed as expected.” However, it’s not obvious exactly what the “known issue” would be that the team known.
Even though the network couldn’t select a different Consensus Group, it had been designed having the ability to skip the blockchain a block forward “to mitigate situations like these,” based on a ten:56 am ET announcement in the team.
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By 1:45 pm EST, new block production began with block number 1435693. They stated it labored carefully with validator operators to make sure these were synced properly and released a brand new software update.
HNT is lower 4.1% in the last 24 hrs, buying and selling at $8.76, according to CoinGecko. It’s lower 84% from the November 2021 all-time high.
