Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko and several accounts associated with the network’s ecosystem reported this week that Solana experienced a significant distributed denial-of-service attack, with some posts indicating traffic peaking around six terabits per second (Tbps).
In a Dec. 9 X post, Yakovenko stated that Solana was facing a six Tbps distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. Earlier that Tuesday, Solana Labs co-founder and president Raj Gokal suggested that the attack was still in progress. Cointelegraph could not independently verify the attack or its scope.
On the same day, the CEO of the Solana-based decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN) project Pipe Network, David Rhodus, noted that the reported metric indicated the attack was at an “industrial scale.” In an update, Pipe Network also claimed that the attack was “one of the largest in internet history,” as six Tbps “translates to billions of packets per second.”
A “bullish” attack, co-founder says
A DDoS attack involves numerous devices inundating a target with traffic to overwhelm it and potentially knock it offline or slow it down. A chart shared by Pipe Network suggested that Solana had experienced the fourth-largest DDoS attack ever recorded. However, in 2025 alone, Cloudflare reported a 29.7 Tbps attack, KrebsOnSecurity reported a 6.3 Tbps attack, and Gcore disclosed a six Tbps attack, none of which appeared on Pipe Network’s chart.
Yakovenko stated in a Dec. 9 post that the attack was “bullish,” suggesting that “someone is expending as much as the chain earns in revenue to execute it.” Similarly, Pipe Network emphasized that “under such load, you’d typically expect increased latency, missed slots, or confirmation delays,” yet the network showed no significant signs of stress.
As of publication time, Solana Labs had not responded to Cointelegraph’s request for comment.
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Solana outage history and fixes
Solana has a track record of multiple downtimes, with some linked to DDoS-like causes. In December 2020, a block propagation issue halted network operations. In September 2021, Solana’s mainnet experienced a 17-hour outage as Grape Protocol launched its on-chain initial DEX offering (IDO) on the crowdfunding platform Raydium AcceleRaytor, overwhelming the network similarly to a DDoS.
In 2022, Solana faced three instances of downtime. Initially, it experienced seven hours of downtime due to transaction spam from bot accounts, followed by four and a half hours due to a bug causing a consensus failure. Later in 2022, Solana suffered 8.5 hours of downtime due to a bug in the fork choice rules, resulting in a consensus failure.
The network stability appeared to improve somewhat thereafter. Cointelegraph found only one downtime instance in 2023, occurring in late February when a fault in Solana’s deduplication logic caused almost 19 hours of downtime. In 2024, the network saw just one downtime instance when it went offline for nearly five hours due to a bug that resulted in an infinite recompile loop.
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Despite the clear downward trend, this is a considerable amount of downtime by blockchain standards. Bitcoin (BTC), the first blockchain, currently boasts an uptime of over 99.99%, with its last downtime incident occurring in 2013.
Bitcoin has recorded just two downtime events since its first block was mined in January 2009. The initial incident took place in August 2010, when a value-overflow bug was exploited, quickly generating nearly 184.47 billion BTC until a patch corrected the issue. The second instance occurred in March 2013, when a bug divided the network between Bitcoin Core versions 0.7 and 0.8. The 2013 event did not generate new Bitcoin.
