Sui Goes Dark: ‘Consensus Outage’ Freezes $1B for Six Hours

The self-proclaimed "high-performance" blockchain halted again. Sui Mainnet stopped producing blocks for nearly six hours on Wednesday, freezing over $1 billion in user assets before validators patched a critical bug. This marks the second major downtime for the network since November 2024.

The Blackout

Block production ceased at approximately 2:52 pm UTC. The Sui Status page flagged the incident as a "Major Outage," forcing centralized exchanges to suspend deposits and withdrawals. Unlike typical congestion events where fees spike, the network simply stopped confirming transactions.

"The Sui network is now back and fully operational… We will share a full incident review in the coming days.", Sui Foundation

Validators deployed a fix around 8:44 pm UTC, restoring connectivity after 5 hours and 52 minutes of silence.

The ‘Consensus’ Failure

The Sui Foundation attributed the stall to a "Consensus outage" but withheld specific technical details pending a post-mortem. This mirrors the opacity of the network’s November 2024 outage, where a bug in congestion control code caused validators to enter a "crash loop."

The recurrence of consensus-level failures challenges Sui’s narrative as a more stable alternative to Solana, which, ironically, has maintained 100% uptime for the past 18 months in this timeline.

Market Reaction

Traders shrugged off the technical failure. SUI whipped between $1.78 and $1.90 during the downtime but held the $1.82 level (-0.08%) as the network came back online. The lack of panic selling suggests the market has priced in "growing pains" for newer Move-based L1s, though institutional liquidity providers likely remain wary of the execution risk.