Solana Outage

According to [the official blog post](https://solana.com/news/02-25-23-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report), At approximately 05:46:16 UTC 2023-02-25, Solana Mainnet Beta suffered a significant performance degradation, eventually leading the validator community to opt for a restart of the network, This was the first Solana outage of 2023 which lasted for 19 hours and 20 minutes, Meaning transactions weren't processing on the network as they were supposed to. The validators tried to restart the network twice over the weekend after the on-chain activity froze. At one time, Solana was processing only 93 TPS. Following the performance degradation, the validator community eventually had to opt for a synchronized chain restart of the network. At approximately Feb 26, 2023 - 01:28 UTC Solana Mainnet Beta was successfully restarted and the network resumed processing user transactions. The decision to restart the network was suggested by the engineers debugging the issues. Following this, the validator community jointly decided to downgrade to the previous stable release, v1.13.6. Simultaneously, 1.14 was rolled out to reduce restart risk. Last year, Solana endured 14 outages, both with small and large downtimes. Infuriated community members pointed out that the continued outages could be due to a massive design flaw in the network. They further criticized the network, saying that out of the 4k TPS that Solana boasts, only 10% are “actual” transactions while adding that the majority of the volume is made up of validators’ messages, which ultimately bogs down the system. In case of an outage, the communication between the validators ceases, during which they turn to Discord to chalk out a plan. However, two-thirds of validators must agree on a solution to get back up, and some of them could be offline or unaware of the outage. Solana’s tech slowdowns aren’t new. Last year, the team behind its development even laid out ways to mitigate such incidents. More recently, the developers implemented a new feature called “Priority fees” to enable users to pay extra to avoid congestion.

New Year, New Solana Outage...