Avalanche C, X-chains experience brief outage due to network bug

Avalanche chains X and C experienced brief outages and a period of degraded performance on March 23, as the result of a bug in the network’s 1.9.12 version.

Avalanche’s C-chain experienced an hour-long outage and was unable to produce any blocks during that time, according to data from AVAScan. Block production stopped at 07:25 UTC+8 at block height 27788298.

The network quality of the X-chain has also been degraded — with the chain only able to process a small number of transactions. Some X-chain nodes took several hours to come online.

Avalanche co-founder says not an outage

Co-founder of Avalanche, Kevin Sekniqi, said that the network was not experiencing an outage. Sekniqi noted that the issue was network instability caused by a bug in Avalanche’s v1.9.12 and that the “network is starting to stabilize again.”

Developers have since patched up the bug and issued a new and updated v1.9.14. Sekniqi urged validators to upgrade to the newest version.

Avalanche quickly regained stability and all of its chains seem to be functioning normally. It took several hours to update SnowTrace — an Avalanche blockchain explorer — which failed to show newly produced blocks.

Exchanges pause withdrawals

Several South Korean exchanges, including UpBit and Bithump, paused AVAX deposits and withdrawals. It’s still unclear when the exchanges will resume these services as all X-chain nodes are back online and the chain is now functioning normally.

Avalanche’s P-chain — Avalanche’s third chain used for platform operations and services such as staking and validating — was not affected by the outage.

Despite the fact that the issue was caused by a client bug that was patched quickly, it prompted a larger conversation about Avalanche’s stability. Many compared it to Solana — which has become notorious for frequent outages. The downtime, although brief, halted activity on the network as it struggled to process more than a few transactions per hour.

AVAX also managed to recover after seeing its price drop by around 4% following the news.