Sui Network Outages: Three Mainnet Halts Blamed on Upgrade Bugs
The Sui Foundation has released an official incident review detailing the network outages that occurred over a 48-hour period. The foundation traced three separate mainnet halts back to two distinct software bugs introduced in the recent v1.72 upgrade.
The Cause Behind the First Two Outages
The first two network halts stemmed from a major flaw in Sui’s gas-charging mechanism. This issue was exposed by a new “address balances” feature launched in the v1.72 software release.
Under specific conditions, a transaction would get canceled due to insufficient funds, but the network would still spend those funds. This flaw created a negative balance, which caused validator nodes to crash during account reconciliation.
Rushing an Interim Fix with Known Risks
To restore network operations quickly after Thursday’s first crash, the development team deployed an interim patch. However, the foundation admitted this quick fix carried a known risk of causing another network halt.
The team accepted this risk to bring the blockchain back online while working on a permanent solution. Unfortunately, the network hit a variation of that exact issue on Friday morning, triggering the second outage.
A Second Bug Triggers the Third Halt
The third network freeze occurred late Friday afternoon and had an entirely different cause. When validators restarted to install the morning’s permanent gas-bug fix, they triggered a latent bug in the network’s randomness settings.
Sui validators must run a setup process for a built-in random number generator at the start of each epoch. Because too few validators were ready after the forced restart, the randomness feature turned off. A bug then prevented validators from recording this change, freezing the network for a third time.
Funds Remain Safe as Network Recovers
The Sui Foundation confirmed that validators have successfully patched both the gas-charging and randomness bugs. The network is now fully operational, and the foundation stressed that user funds were never at risk. No finalized transactions were reversed during the recovery process.
To speed up the troubleshooting process across all three incidents, the foundation credited AI agents. These AI systems scanned validator logs and compiled critical performance metrics in real-time.
Market Impact and Future Fixes
Following the technical disruptions, the network’s native token (SUI) dropped roughly 3.3%, trading around $0.88. Sui is a Layer 1 blockchain developed by Mysten Labs, a team founded by former Meta engineers.
Moving forward, the Sui Foundation plans to upgrade its architecture to contain failures. The goal is to ensure future bugs will automatically drop faulty transactions instead of forcing the entire blockchain to halt.
