Sui Says v1.72 Upgrade Bugs Caused Three Network Outages in Two Days

Sui, the layer-1 blockchain, has disclosed the cause of three network outages last week.

The Block reported on May 31 that the Sui Foundation said in a report that two bugs introduced during the rollout of the v1.72 upgrade on May 26 triggered the cascading outages.

The first and second outages stemmed from the same issue: an error involving the Address Balances feature newly introduced in v1.72 and the way gas fees were processed.

According to the Sui Foundation, some transactions were rejected because of insufficient balances, but the network still treated the funds as if they had been spent. That created negative balances, and the network halted as validators tried to reconcile those accounts.

The foundation applied an emergency patch to fix the problem. But the patch still contained a flaw that could cause another outage, and a second disruption followed the next day.

The third outage was caused by a separate bug. As validators restarted nodes to address the second issue, a dormant error in the function that stores randomness settings was triggered. Validators then failed to properly record the randomness-setting state after the restart, preventing the epoch from ending and causing the network to stop again.

The Sui Foundation said both the gas-processing bug and the randomness bug have now been fixed and that the network is operating normally.

It added that the incident did not result in any loss of user funds or canceled transactions.

The foundation said it plans to strengthen its fault-isolation framework so that, if a similar problem occurs again, it can remove only the affected transactions instead of halting the entire network.

Sui also suffered a network outage for about six hours in January. Operations were temporarily suspended in November 2024 as well because of a validator-related bug.