Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko and various 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 spikes approaching six terabits per second (Tbps).
In a Dec. 9 X post, Yakovenko noted that Solana was under a six Tbps DDoS attack. Earlier on 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 magnitude.
Additionally, on Tuesday, David Rhodus, CEO of Solana-based decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN) project Pipe Network, pointed out that the shared metrics indicated the attack was of an “industrial-scale.” In an update, Pipe Network also claimed that the attack was “one of the largest in internet history,” noting that 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, resulting in downtime or slow performance. A chart shared by Pipe Network indicated that Solana encountered the fourth-largest DDoS attack ever documented. 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 wrote in a Dec. 9 post that the attack was “bullish,” also implying that “someone is spending as much as the chain generates in revenue to execute it.” Similarly, Pipe Network emphasized that “under such a load, you’d typically expect increased latency, missed slots, or confirmation delays,” while the network exhibited no significant signs of strain.
Solana Labs had not responded to Cointelegraph’s request for comment by the time of publication.
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Solana outage history and remedies
Solana has a documented history of multiple outages, some linked to DDoS-like causes. In December 2020, a block propagation bug halted network operations. In September 2021, Solana’s mainnet experienced a 17-hour downtime when Grape Protocol’s launch of its onchain initial DEX offering (IDO) on the crowdfunding platform Raydium AcceleRaytor overwhelmed the network, resembling a DDoS scenario.
In 2022, Solana encountered three instances of downtime. First, it faced seven hours of downtime due to transaction spam from bot accounts, followed by four and a half hours of downtime from a bug that led to a consensus failure. Additionally, Solana experienced 8.5 hours of downtime due to a bug in the fork choice rules, resulting in consensus failure.
Since then, the network stability appeared to improve. Cointelegraph could identify only one instance of downtime in 2023, when a fault in Solana’s deduplication logic caused nearly 19 hours of downtime. In 2024, the network again reported a single downtime incident, lasting nearly five hours due to a bug that created an infinite recompile loop.
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Despite the observable downtrend, this downtime is considerable by blockchain standards. Bitcoin (BTC), the pioneer blockchain, currently has an uptime exceeding 99.99%, with its last downtime incident occurring in 2013.
Bitcoin has faced only two downtime incidents since its first block was mined in January 2009. The first incident occurred in August 2010, when a value-overflow bug was exploited, temporarily creating nearly 184.47 billion BTC until a patch rectified the issue. The second was in March 2013, when a bug split the network between Bitcoin Core 0.7 and 0.8. The 2013 event did not generate new Bitcoin.
