- IOG Founder Charles Hoskinson addressed the two-minute node outage on the Cardano network on January 22nd, 2023.
- Hoskinson discussed the balance between prevention and recovery in distributed systems to contextualize the anomalous occurrence.
- The root cause of the outage is still under investigation. Input Output Global (IOG) has stated that the anomaly was not a concern and that block production was only impacted briefly.
On Tuesday, January 23rd, 2023, Cardano (ADA) and IOG founder Charles Hoskinson tweeted a video in which he hosted a ‘whiteboard session’ to address the two-minute node outage that occurred on Cardano on January 22nd.
.tweet-container,.twitter-tweet.twitter-tweet-rendered,blockquote.twitter-tweet{min-height:261px}.tweet-container{position:relative}blockquote.twitter-tweet{display:flex;max-width:550px;margin-top:10px;margin-bottom:10px}blockquote.twitter-tweet p{font:20px -apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,"Segoe UI",Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif}.tweet-container div:first-child{ position:absolute!Important }.tweet-container div:last-child{ position:relative!Important }
Prevention versus Recovery in Distributed Systems [Whiteboard] https://t.co/BbrApJdhfL— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) January 23, 2023
A Balance of Prevention and Recovery
In the 23-minute video, Hoskinson delves deep into the balance between prevention and recovery in distributed systems, stating:
"The more complexity that you introduce, the more probability that the system, at any given time, is going to have some bad cells, and the system has to purge those bad cells, especially as you scale it." Hoskinson highlights that in any “good distributed system,” there has to be a balance of prevention and recovery and opines that the Cardano ecosystem is experiencing “a very natural growing pain in distributed systems design.” He further states that “the very fact that we [Cardano] were able to recover in under two minutes is a good indication that there is a nice balance of these features inside the system between prevention and recovery given the ‘demons’ we face.”
A Catch-22 of Preventative Measures
According to the network’s founder, Cardano could have taken additional preventative measures to narrow or prevent the possibility of issues arising. He explained how these preventative measures could have included the following “trade-offs:”
The Cardano Node Outage – A Transient Anomaly
The brief outage of Cardano nodes occurred on January 22nd, 2023, as approximately 50% of all active relay and block-producing nodes disconnected for a short period before restarting without intervention.
Input Output Global (IOG) claimed that the anomaly was not a concern since block production was only impacted briefly, and the network unsynced momentarily before most nodes automatically recovered. The root cause of the outage is still under research.
The Cardano blockchain has not experienced an outage in five years and automatically recovered affected nodes with minimal downtime. The swift recovery after the node outage reflects the detailed methodology behind the development of the Cardano blockchain.
On the Flipside
- Hoskinson stated that Cardano has factors that need to be considered regarding its failure and recovery model.
- Since the node outage on January 22nd, Cardano (ADA) prices have not seen any dramatic changes, from trading at a high of $0.38 USD on the day of the outage to a price of $0.35 at the time of writing.
Why You Should Care
The Cardano node outage, albeit brief and with no major implications on the network, indicates the “natural growing pains” of the distributed system, according to Hoskinson. These issues are inescapable as the volume of transactions increases and computational complexity grows.
The resilience of prevention and recovery protocols is imperative to ensuring the safety of funds on the network.
Read more about the Cardano node outage:
Cardano (ADA) Network Bounces Back After Node Outage