IOTA Network Came To A Standstill But Is Back Alive Again

The IOTA Foundation has been criticized over the years about the Coordinator, a centralized node that gives the final confirmation for transactions, known as Tangle. The foundation is currently working on beta to eliminate this centralized node in an update called Hornet but it isn't quite ready to be released. Without Tangle functioning properly, the blockchain network would be unable to operate. As a result, IOTA is open to vulnerabilities.

This vulnerability came to fruition, as there were reported irregularities with the network. Transactions could not be properly carried out. Even though Tangle continued to operate, there was an error on the coordinator. The error was first noticed due to the transactions per second (TPS) dropping significantly. Accordingly, transactions could not be carried out on IOTA, at least not quickly. They were still on the network, just severely bogged down.

David Sønstebø, one of IOTA network’s founders, shared on Discord the bug. Vrom tweeted about the discord discussion, which can be viewed here. Sønstebø referred to the event as “unfortunate” and that the kinks are being ironed out. But, since many members of the IOTA team are out on holiday vacation, it took more than 15 hours for the team to get it fixed. This left capacity quite limited during those hours.

According to the Developer's GitHub post, this is the reason for the shutdown - 

There is an edge case where IRI didn't account for a transaction that was shared between two distinct bundles. Once it marked it as "counted" in one bundle, it was ignored for the next bundle. This lead to a corrupt ledger state.

As of now, the network has been restored, and you can see transactions moving here.

For now, the community will need to wait for the next node upgrade for the network to become more decentralized. But at least transactions are moving through the network.