EOS Mainnet Takes A 5 Hour Breather Due To A Small Bug, Criticized

The EOS mainnet had to take a quick breather yesterday, with an unexpected bug causing its blockchain to come to a full stop.

EOS New York stated that the blockchain paused at 9:56 UTC, which immediately triggered a knee-jerk response from all active EOS Block Producers. The block producers along with ‘standby nodes’ quickly jumped into a conference call to help identify and amend the issue.

After almost an hour of discussion, members of the conference call decided that it would be best for all standby nodes to temporarily disable their nodes, while still backing up vital information.

Eventually, the group of determined individuals found the cause of the problem, declaring that they were working on a fix. After almost five hours of work, the EOS chain resumed, allowing for transactions to go through at 14:48 UTC.

The #EOS Mainnet is live again and no data (irreversible transactions) are lost. Excellent response from block producers and block one to find the root cause & fix within a few hours.

— EOS Authority (@EOSauthority) June 16, 2018

Despite the quick response, users still felt an almost five-hour downtime, expressing their anger and disbelief on this project’s native subreddit. 

Reddit user, ‘SonataSystems’, jumped on the fact that such a bug exists, saying:

Is there a realistic (real world configuration/load) testnet to put these patches through a strong, regressive gauntlet prior to release? Are they just chucking untested code over the fence? Just how much test coverage is there, and how much regressive testing is performed, where is it performed and by whom?

This isn’t the best sign for a brand-new cryptocurrency project, as the downtime deterred thousands of transactions, if not more.

This pause has only added to the negative sentiment held towards this ambitious project, as it aims to overtake players like Ethereum. EOS has had a far from smooth launch, taking almost two weeks to ensure that the blockchain was stable and fully functional.

Many critics attributed this delay to the fact that the ICO team handed the management ‘reins’ to the community, removing the efficiency of an almost $4 billion fund.

On June 14th, the mainnet officially launched, with many users believing that all worries were far behind them.  However, with this bug crippling the EOS blockchain, it is apparent that there may be more issues to worry about, at least in the short term. 

Some speculate that Block.one, the team behind EOS, did not do enough work to ensure that the mainnet was free of bugs. Just days before the scheduled mainnet launch, a developer racked up over $100,000 in bounty claims while finding errors within the pre-released code repository.

Considering the fact that a common user, not backed by any corporations or ICO funds, found a multitude of bugs has had some worried. Would it be all too crazy to assume that there are other bugs that lie in wait for other users to find?

EOS has had a tumultuous start, to say the least. But there are still many who still root for the success of this infantile blockchain, not deterred by yesterday’s events. 

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