Helium Network Team Resolves Consensus Error After 4-Hour Outage

Network downtime affected token transfers and miner rewards, but not devices during the 4 hour outage caused by a failure of the consensus group.< /p> New

The Helium Internet of Things (IoT) blockchain went down for approximately 4 hours on Monday due to validator outages due to a software update, which delayed the completion of transactions.

During the outage, devices transferring data over the network were unaffected, but miner rewards and token transfers were left pending. The team solved the problem by skipping the blockchain one block and resuming normal functions.

At 10:20 a.m. EST, the Consensus Group stopped producing blocks at block height 1435692 on the Helium blockchain, according to a status update. Due to lack of network consensus, token transfers could not be completed and new blocks were not produced.

We're back friends. The chain has just processed block 1,435,693. We will continue to monitor the chain throughout the day.

Helium is an IoT network that uses physical radio access points to allow users to connect to their devices from anywhere there is radio coverage. On the Helium Network, a consensus group consists of 43 randomly selected validating nodes at fixed intervals to provide network consensus.

In the post-mortem of the event, Helium engineers cited two reasons why validators stopped building consensus on the network.

First, an issue with a Friday software update for validators contributed to the problem. The v1.12.3 update was designed to support 5G Mobile subnet and its MOBILE token.

In addition, a "local network failure" was also to blame. In the Discord channel of the project, the moderator Helium Digerati explained that a high concentration of va ...