Network halted twice on May 28, once on May 29 as edge cases in gas charging and randomness state handling crashed validators
Sui’s mainnet experienced three separate outages across May 28 and May 29 after the network’s 1.72 release exposed bugs in gas charging logic and validator restart handling, according to a postmortem from the Sui Foundation.
The first outage began around 7:00 a.m. PT on May 28 and lasted until approximately 1:30 p.m. PT. A second outage followed on May 29, starting at roughly 5:00 a.m. PT and resolving by 8:30 a.m. PT. A third outage struck the same day at 1:30 p.m. PT and persisted until 7:20 p.m. PT.
The 1.72 upgrade introduced address balances, enabling users to store funds and pay for gas without relying solely on coin objects. Transactions can now pay gas through address balances, coin objects, or a hybrid structure combining both.
The first two outages stemmed from crash bugs in the interaction between gas charging logic and the new address balance feature. The third outage was triggered during a scheduled epoch change after validator restarts exposed a latent bug in how randomness state was preserved via the distributed key generation (DKG) protocol.
“During the outages, no user funds were at risk, and the network did not revert any committed transactions when it resumed,” the Sui Foundation stated.
The foundation chose an interim patch to restore the network quickly while engineers developed a more complete solution. The fix for the third outage involved persisting DKG status across restarts and adding a mechanism to close stuck epochs at a coordinated point.
The Sui Foundation emphasized the complexity of modifying gas logic. “Changing gas logic is a delicate operation. As explained above, there are complicated interactions between address balances and coins. Other than fixing bugs, gas logic changes must preserve all previous behavior or use appropriate version gating,” the foundation said.
The third outage exposed how validator restarts could break the randomness state preservation mechanism. When validators restarted and no longer retained information that DKG had failed, the paused queue grew unchecked. “With validators no longer remembering DKG had failed, neither could happen, the paused queue grew, and end-of-epoch logic, which must drain that queue before closing, was left waiting on DKG that would never come,” the foundation explained.
“As of now, validators have fully addressed the known issues caused by both the original gas-charging bug and the randomness-state bug, and network activity has resumed,” the Sui Foundation said.
The foundation identified end-of-epoch resilience and gas charging rigor as areas requiring further investment. SUI traded at $0.8798 at press time.
