The blockchain-based social network Steemit went down yesterday for simply nine hours. Within outage, a certified Steem website returned a server error, along with other Steem-based dApps were non-functional.?The blockchain itself seemed to be frozen, with several nodes listed as stuck. The Steem Network acknowledged the difficulty on Twitter:
We're cognizant of the problem in the #Steem #blockchain and are hard at work to get it resolved. We'll post updates because they happen.
— Steem September 17, 2019
Several hours later, the Steem Network indicated that the platform would soon be functional yet again, and the web site is now back online.
Status update: Witnesses are coming back again online and producing blocks. Network is starting to become more stable. We're implementing getting our node back online having fix. #steem #steemit
— Steem September 17, 2019
No Cause Identified
The exact root cause of the outage is unknown. The Steem Network reports that the platform was not hacked and therefore funds are safe. It truly is unclear your house outage was attached to the hard fork upgrade that is currently underway, however, the Steem Network has implied that the two events are unrelated. It can be some time before the full explanation emerged.
Users on Twitter are, unsurprisingly, surprised the outage happened. Although blockchains often slow to somewhat of a crawl if it’s subject to high traffic, blockchains usually are resilient against complete outages. The way in which network set in no state to complete transactions or publish new articles, various nodes provides the data for viewing.
As such, it can be unclear why Steemit did not leave up an archived form of the site. Steemit has lots of nodes that can supply data, several of which were online all through the interruption. Some look at block explorers, like SteemDB, were functional and could be used to view Steem posts usually in the outage.
Was the price tag Affected?
Around enough time of the outage, the money necessary for Steem spiked to $0.77. Within the next nine hours, the associated fee fell by approximately 9% to $0.70. However, seems like unlikely the fact that spike is part of a long term trend. One Reddit user notes that your brief spike “may just be due to disabled deposits/withdrawals” and this the price is “using the general trend again.”
Steem’s price may be on a slight decline, even well before yesterday’s events. Nevertheless, an outage so around a vital update could reflect badly in the platform. Luckily for Steemit, none in their competitors took the chance promote themselves during the platform’s absence.