Helium network team resolves consensus error after 4-hour outage

The Web of Issues (IoT) blockchain Helium shut down for about 4 hours on Monday because of validator outages from a software program replace, inflicting delayed transaction finality.

Through the outage, gadgets transferring knowledge over the community weren’t affected, however miner rewards and token transfers have been left pending. The workforce resolved the problem by skipping the blockchain ahead by one block and resuming regular capabilities.

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At 10:20 am EST, the Consensus Group stopped producing blocks at block peak 1435692 on the Helium blockchain, according to a standing replace. Missing community consensus, token transfers couldn’t be accomplished, and new blocks weren’t being produced.

We’re again people. The chain simply processed block 1,435,693. We’ll proceed to watch the chain all through the day.

— Helium (@helium) July 11, 2022

Helium is an IoT community that makes use of bodily radio hotspots to permit customers to hook up with their gadgets from wherever there may be radio protection. On the Helium community, a Consensus Group consists of 43 validator nodes randomly chosen in fastened intervals to supply community consensus.

Within the postmortem for the occasion, Helium engineers cited two causes validators stopped creating consensus on the community.

First, a difficulty with a Friday software program replace for validators contributed to the issue. The v1.12.3 replace was designed to supply help for the 5G Cell subnetwork and its MOBILE token.

Moreover, a “native community outage” was additionally accountable. Within the venture’s Discord channel, Helium moderator Digerati defined {that a} excessive focus of validators randomly chosen because the Consensus Group on the time of the outage was working on the identical Amazon Net Service (AWS) community, which skilled technical difficulties.

AWS is a world cloud computing and knowledge storage service that can be utilized to boost laptop networks like Helium.

Compounding the issue was the failure of an auto-skip characteristic that ought to have chosen a brand new Consensus Group routinely. The workforce said that “a recognized subject prevented the auto-skip characteristic from working as anticipated.” Nonetheless, it isn’t clear what the “recognized subject” is that the workforce referred to.

Though the community couldn’t select a special Consensus Group, it was designed with the flexibility to skip the blockchain a block ahead “to mitigate conditions akin to these,” in line with a ten:56 am ET announcement from the workforce.

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By 1:45 pm EST, new block manufacturing began with block quantity 1435693. The workforce mentioned it labored intently with validator operators to make sure they have been synced accurately and launched a brand new software program replace.

HNT is down 4.1% over the previous 24 hours, buying and selling at $8.76, according to CoinGecko. It’s down 84% from its November 2021 all-time excessive.