Sui mainnet stalls again after v1.72 gas fix

Sui’s mainnet experienced a network stall after an interim gas-charging fix tied to the v1.72 release halted block production for about three hours and 30 minutes before activity resumed. The interruption affected validators and temporarily stopped new blocks on the layer-1 smart contract network.

The Sui team posted that both Thursday’s and Friday’s halts were caused by the interaction of the v1.72 release, which introduced address balances and new gas charging logic. The last block before Friday’s interruption was recorded at about 11:51 UTC, and block production resumed roughly three and a half hours later, according to Sui’s uptime dashboard. The team warned network activity “may be paused” while validators worked to restore progress.

An interim fix deployed on Thursday aimed to restore functionality quickly, but the team noted the remedy carried a “low probability” of causing further disruption. After the Friday stall, a longer-term software fix for the gas-charging changes was implemented by a majority of Sui validators. Validators experienced disruptions on both days as they rolled updates and coordinated the patch.

Thursday’s outage lasted nearly six hours and was linked to a “crash bug in the gas charging logic,” according to the team’s update. In January the network was offline for more than six hours because of a consensus bug. That incident involved validators submitting conflicting transactions to the protocol’s checkpoint mechanism, preventing the network from reaching the required threshold for consensus. The post-mortem reported checkpoint certification and quarantine mechanisms contained the issue, preventing any user-visible fork. The team reported that user funds were not at risk and no certified transactions were rolled back.

High-throughput smart contract blockchains separate data availability, transaction execution and validator consensus into multiple layers. When protocol or runtime changes interact across those layers, additional points of failure can emerge.

Sui’s engineering and validator coordination efforts are ongoing as the project applies the long-term fix and monitors the network. The team posted that Thursday’s patch was an interim measure “designed to restore functionality to the network” and that the permanent solution has now been adopted by most validators to reduce the chance of further stalls.