Sui Mainnet Hit by Three Outages in 48 Hours After v1.72

Steady attention without excessive speculation.

The outages struck on May 28 and May 29, halting block production for a combined total of roughly 16 hours. According to the Sui Foundation’s incident review published today, the network is now fully stable with all known issues resolved. No user funds were lost or placed at risk during any of the three halts.

What Caused the First Two Outages

The first halt began at approximately 7am PT on May 28 and lasted roughly 6.5 hours. The second hit at around 5am PT on May 29 and ran for about 3.5 hours. Both traced back to the same root cause.

Version 1.72 introduced a feature called “address balances.” This allowed users to pay gas fees directly from their address balance without listing specific coin objects. The feature simplified user experience but also created a dangerous edge case.

When two transactions competed for the same address-balance funds, the runtime tried to “smash” coins during a cancelled transaction. That process produced a negative delta, which then triggered an underflow crash in the settlement logic. Because all validators processed the same transactions, they all crashed at the same time.

With no validators online, Sui’s Mysticeti consensus engine could not produce checkpoints. Block production stopped entirely. Sui confirmed on X that the network resumed on May 28 after validators adopted an interim fix via PR #26828.

Second Day Brought Two More Halts

The interim fix had a known limitation. The Sui team acknowledged this when they deployed it, noting a low probability of triggering another halt. That probability materialized early on May 29.

“Both today’s and yesterday’s halts are due to the interaction of the 1.72 release, which introduced Address Balances, and gas charging logic,” Sui Network stated on X. “The interim fix had a known issue with a low probability of causing a halt. This morning, the network hit a variant of the known issue and halted.”

Validators then adopted a long-term gas fix through PR #26843. That resolved the gas-charging problem permanently.

Then a third incident emerged. At around 1:30pm PT on May 29, the network stalled again during a scheduled epoch change. A latent bug in how validators persist their DKG (distributed key generation) randomness state prevented the epoch from closing properly. Validators had forgotten a failed DKG verdict after restarting, which stalled the end-of-epoch queue.

A third fix via PR #26846 resolved this issue. The network fully recovered by approximately 7:20pm PT on May 29.

How Validators Restarted the Network

Sui uses Mysticeti consensus, which requires more than two-thirds of validator stake to agree on new checkpoints. When validators crash, the network halts until enough of them upgrade to a patched version and re-establish consensus.

For each of the three incidents, validators coordinated to adopt the software fix. Once more than two-thirds of stake came online with the new binary, checkpoint production resumed automatically. No fork occurred, and no committed transactions were reverted.

The process relies on off-chain coordination between validator operators. According to the Sui Foundation’s review, this coordination worked smoothly across all three restarts.

Sui Mainnet Outage Impact on SUI Price and TVL

SUI dropped approximately 6-8% during the May 28 outage, falling from around $0.99 to a low near $0.90. The token partially recovered to $0.92-$0.93 before the second-day incidents.

By May 31, SUI traded around $0.87-$0.90, down roughly 14.7% on the week. Broader market pressure contributed to the decline alongside the outage-specific selling.

According to DefiLlama data, Sui’s total value locked sat at approximately $521-$542 million across 137 protocols. TVL showed only minor fluctuations during the outage windows. No mass liquidations occurred, and DeFi protocols like Cetus Protocol and NAVI Protocol reported only temporary disruptions.

On-chain data from Suiscan and Sui Explorer showed clear gaps in checkpoint production during each halt. The Sui status page confirmed “major outage” and “degraded performance” while public RPC nodes remained reachable.

Community Reaction Split Between Frustration and Praise

Reaction across X, Reddit, and Telegram split along predictable lines. Retail users focused on price impact and reliability concerns. Some called the response “half-baked” and questioned whether the team prioritized speed over stability.

Builders and insiders took a more measured view. Many praised the depth of the incident review and the speed of the fixes. “What gives confidence isn’t that the bug was fixed, but that the response goes beyond a patch,” one community member noted on X.

Several commentators drew comparisons to Solana’s outage history in 2021-2022. Solana experienced multiple network halts during its early growth phase before eventually stabilizing. The parallel raises a question: is Sui following a similar maturation path, or do repeated outages signal deeper concerns?

This marked Sui’s third major outage since late 2024, following incidents in November 2024 and January 2026. CoinDesk reported the May 28 stall as the second outage of 2026. No independent researchers have published analyses contradicting the Sui team’s technical explanation.

What Comes Next for Sui

The Sui Core Team’s incident review outlines future resilience investments. The team acknowledged that further work is needed on the epoch-transition path, where the DKG bug emerged.

No user compensation plan has been announced. Whether one will follow remains an open question.

For now, the three known issues are resolved. The network has resumed normal operation, and validators are running the patched software. How Sui handles its upgrade testing going forward will likely determine whether these incidents become a footnote or a recurring pattern.