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The TON blockchain network experienced a significant disruption on Wednesday morning (SGT), likely due to an overwhelming influx of transactions related to the launch of a new memecoin, DOGS.
According to Tonscan data, the TON network stopped generating blocks for nearly 8 hours, with the last block produced at 06:11:46 UTC+8. This outage had immediate consequences for cryptocurrency exchanges, as Bybit and Binance announced the suspension of all deposits and withdrawals through the Toncoin (TON) network to mitigate potential risks associated with the network instability.
The TON Foundation attributed the outage to the "network overload" caused by the overwhelming number of DOGS transactions, explaining that the garbage collection process, responsible for clearing unused data, was overloaded, leading to many validators losing consensus. To restore consensus, validators were required to restart at 4:00 UTC with specific flags.
While the TON blockchain network has been restored as of around 5:30 am UTC, the outage has raised a ton of questions about the network's scalability and resilience, particularly in the face of sudden surges in activity.
On Saturday, the arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov on Saturday triggered a TON sell-off of around 18%.
Durov was arrested in France after arriving on a private jet at Le Bourget Airport. The Russian native who holds French citizenship and lives in UAE was arrested under a warrant for offenses connected to the Telegram app.