Zilliqa’s Network Troubles During Upgrade Rollout

The Zilliqa network has experienced operational disruptions, which have affected block production on its mainnet. The network functionality has been restored as of May 10, although the cause of the disruptions is still being investigated. The Zilliqa team has informed the community that the network is now online after temporary disruptions to block production. The infrastructure team is currently monitoring the stability of the network and working to identify the underlying cause of the recent disruptions.

Since the signs of disruption were noticed on May 8, the Zilliqa technical team has been actively working for almost 48 hours to prevent further disruptions. On May 9, the technical team discovered a malfunction that resulted in a null value instead of a node’s RLP following a potentially invalid database lookup. The team has created internal rehearsal networks to replicate this issue and test bug fixes in an isolated environment before implementing them on Testnet and mainnet deployments.

By May 9, around 2:30 pm UTC, the team had fixed the issue and restored full functionality by rolling out the Zilliqa version 9.3.4 network upgrade. The upgrade includes various enhancements to EVM compatibility, and the team apologized for any inconvenience caused to users and the Zilliqa community. Block production on the Zilliqa mainnet was disrupted again on May 9 around 7:05 PM UTC, despite the fix and upgrade rollout. The team has improved its debugging processes to better diagnose the issue and address the root cause of the disruption.

This is not the first time that Zilliqa block production has been impacted by technical issues. In December 2023, there was an interruption to block production, leading to a significant decrease in daily Zilliqa blockchain transactions. The team is currently investigating the underlying cause of the recent network disruptions and expresses gratitude to the community for their patience and support during the resolution process.