Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko and various accounts linked to the network’s ecosystem reported this week that Solana experienced a significant distributed denial-of-service attack, with some sources indicating traffic that peaked 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 on Tuesday, Solana Labs co-founder and president Raj Gokal suggested that the attack was still ongoing. Cointelegraph could not independently verify the attack or its magnitude.
On the same day, the CEO of the Solana-based decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN) project Pipe Network, David Rhodus, pointed out that the reported metrics indicated the attack was at an “industrial scale.” In an update, Pipe Network also asserted that the attack was “one of the largest in internet history,” as six Tbps “equates to billions of packets per second.”
A “bullish” attack, co-founder states
A DDoS attack consists of numerous devices overwhelming a target with traffic to disrupt its operations. A chart shared by Pipe Network indicated that Solana encountered the fourth-largest DDoS attack ever reported. However, in 2025 alone, Cloudflare documented a 29.7 Tbps attack, KrebsOnSecurity noted a 6.3 Tbps attack, and Gcore revealed a six Tbps attack, none of which appeared on Pipe Network’s chart.
Yakovenko wrote in a Dec. 9 post that the attack was “bullish,” implying that “someone is spending as much as the chain generates in revenue to execute it.” In a similar vein, Pipe Network emphasized that “under such strain, one would typically expect increased latency, missed slots, or confirmation delays,” yet the network showed no notable signs of distress.
Solana Labs had not responded to Cointelegraph’s request for comment by the time of publication.
Related: Coinbase resolves Solana transaction backlog following a 48-hour delay
Solana outage history and fixes
Solana has experienced multiple downtimes, some of which were linked to DDoS-like factors. In December 2020, a block propagation bug halted network operations. In September 2021, Solana’s mainnet faced a 17-hour downtime as Grape Protocol’s onchain initial DEX offering (IDO) launch on the crowdfunding platform Raydium AcceleRaytor overwhelmed the network, akin to a DDoS attack.
In 2022, Solana had three instances of downtime. Initially, it went offline for seven hours due to transaction spam from bot accounts. The network suffered four and a half hours of downtime due to a bug causing consensus failure. Again in 2022, Solana experienced 8.5 hours of downtime caused by a bug in the fork choice rules, resulting in consensus failure.
Subsequently, the network stability seemed to improve slightly. Cointelegraph identified only one downtime instance in 2023, when, in late February, an issue in Solana’s deduplication logic led to nearly 19 hours of downtime. In 2024, the network again recorded a single downtime event when it experienced almost five hours of downtime due to a bug that caused an infinite recompile loop.
Related: Solana users faced delays after the launch of Trump memecoins
Despite the observable downtrend, this amount of downtime is considerable 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 faced only two downtime events since its inception in January 2009. The first was in August 2010, when a value-overflow bug was exploited, temporarily creating nearly 184.47 billion BTC until a patch resolved the issue. The second incident occurred in March 2013, when a bug split the network between Bitcoin Core 0.7 and 0.8, but this event did not generate new Bitcoin.
