The Open Network (TON), the blockchain network linked to Telegram, has resumed operations after a major outage that lasted for about six hours due to a surge in network traffic.
TON is back online and producing blocks as normal, according to a post from X on August 28.
What caused the power outage?
Some community members speculated that the outage may be related to the recent arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov in France.
Durov was arrested in Paris on August 21 and charged with aiding and abetting illicit trafficking, refusing to cooperate with law enforcement, and tolerating various illegal activities on social messaging applications.
However, Ian Wittkopf, head of TON Ventures, clarified that the outage was due to a high volume of transactions resulting from the airdrop of over $550 million worth of tokens to the community through the issuance of the DOGS meme coin token, adding that this may have been the day when TON had the most active users.
DOGS is a meme coin associated with the Telegram community. Launched on August 26, the project attracted a lot of attention due to its unique airdrop method. On August 27, blockchain research firm Tonscan reported that the meme coin was generating a large amount of traffic, causing some “central services” to temporarily stop working.
TON corroborated this, explaining that the network experienced unusual load activity, overwhelming several validators and preventing them from clearing old transactions, resulting in a loss of consensus.
TON said in a Telegram post:
“Due to recent high activity (over 20 million transactions in the past two days), garbage collection caused many validators to be overloaded for extended periods of time, resulting in a loss of consensus among validators.”
In a blockchain network, validators verify transactions in blocks. If blocks stop being produced, transactions will go unconfirmed, resulting in an interruption in service.
TON is in the recovery phase
Despite the massive outage, the price of TON’s network token bucked the overall market trend, dropping a modest 1.3% over the past 24 hours, while other major cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum fell an average of 6% over the same period.
Meanwhile, some members of the crypto community saw the outage as a positive sign for TON, likening it to past outages on other prominent blockchains such as Solana and Avalanche, who argued that such outages on Layer-1 networks are often indicative of high adoption rates.
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