The Open Network (TON) encountered a significant outage, failing to process any transactions for six hours, as revealed by on-chain analytics. According to Tonscan data, new block production halted around 10:11 p.m. UTC on Tuesday.
As a result, exchanges like Binance and Bybit temporarily disabled deposits and withdrawals related to the network. “TON Blockchain is undergoing a disruption in block production,” stated TON in a post on X. “The problem stems from the abnormal load faced by TON. Certain validators are struggling to eliminate older transactions from the database, leading to a loss of consensus.”
Major Outage Leaves TON Paralysed
The TON Status group on Telegram reported that validators attempted to restart nodes simultaneously with specific flags to restore normalcy to the network. “Currently, not enough validators have restarted their nodes with the correct flags. If you haven’t done so yet, please restart your nodes ASAP,” the group advised.
DOGS Airdrop Triggers Network Overload
An X user, @maverickqe, identifying as a strategic advisor for the TON Society, said that the DOGS memecoin airdrop triggered a surge in transactions and consequently overloaded the network. “Garbage collection overwhelmed many of the validators, causing them to lose consensus,” the user shared. The DOGS memecoin, which is associated with Telegram, gained traction as its developers aim to increase its utility within the Telegram ecosystem. The airdrop event commenced on Monday, distributing 81.5% of its total supply of 550 billion tokens to community members. Last week, DOGS announced that six million verified users had requested a share of the airdrop.
This incident came after the arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov by French authorities, which led to widespread backlash within both the Telegram and TON communities. On Tuesday, a Telegram mini-app was launched to advocate for Durov’s release, amassing nearly 1.7 million signatures.
Community Concerns Over Network Stability
Tonk Inu, a community-based platform on TON, acknowledged the network instability on X (formerly Twitter) due to the increased interest in DOGS. The memecoin launched on August 26, quickly gaining popularity and trading on major exchanges like Binance and OKX. Within the first ten hours, it reached a trading volume of $1.7 billion and a peak market cap of $891 million. However, its price later dropped from a maximum of $0.0018 to approximately $0.0012.
The TON chain came to a halt on August 28, as block production ceased due to network congestion fueled by DOGS hype. Data from TON Explorer confirmed no new blocks were created for nearly seven hours, noting block 39987437 was the last mined prior to the outage. That said, block production has since resumed.
The proprietary TON memecoin platform, Tonk Inu, was quick to highlight that DOGS’ launch caused soaring traffic, which likely contributed to the outage. The official X account of TON confirmed the disruption, citing “abnormal load,” stating that around 20 million transactions had occurred within 48 hours. “Multiple validators could not clear the database of old transactions, leading to a loss of consensus.”
Due to the heavy load, TON validator nodes reportedly experienced a consensus loss. The developers behind TON Core advised validators to restart their nodes by 4:00 AM UTC to reset processes, manage the backlog, and realign synchronisation.
DOGS Memecoin Hits $1.7 Billion in Volume Within Hours of Launch
Similarly, in a related news, DOGS was listed on Bitget’s PoolX platform where short traders were looking forward to a bearish trend. At the same time, the TON team provided the community with constant updates on the situation, stating that all their assets were safe and that the transactions in progress would be processed. If DOGS’ hype was partly the cause of the outage, then TON community member Justin was quick to assign blame to the new memecoin.
DOGS, which started on August 26, made over $1.7 billion in transaction volume in its first ten hours. Blockchain explorer Tonscan specified the next day that the memecoin generated a lot of traffic and led to the temporary shutdown of some “central services. ” For the latest updates on this story and other cryptocurrency market news, keep following DeyThere.
