ETH 2.0 Medalla Testnet Is Online Again After Days Of Outage

The ETH 2.0 Medalla testnet is online again after it suffered a multi-day outage so let’s find out more in the latest Ethereum news today.

Validator nodes are running again after ETH 2.0 Medalla testnet went down for three days due to an outage. The testnet is back online after a synchronization error that put down the entire network. the nodes participation rates are back to 70% of pre-crash levels. Developers are trying to create a new strategy in case the network has to respond to similar issues in the future:

“Medalla is saved!

INFO blockchain: Synced new block block=0x68a46008… epoch=3428 finalizedEpoch=3424 finalizedRoot=0xf0e6b2fe… slot=109700”

The ETH 2.0 Medalla testnet crashed due to a Cloudflare outage that affected the node synchronization as the issue prevented nodes from validating blocks and processing transactions. One of the main issues was the dominance of the network clients named Lighthouse and Prysm. The diversification between the clients is much needed to keep the network intact if some client breaks in the future. The issue was not addressed which led to almost a complete loss of the network’s participants between August 15-16. The nodes that run the Prysm clients jumped four hours forward and started to make the blocks for the chain which doesn’t exist.

It turned out Prysm had a design flaw. The client relied on Cloudflare that is a third party, to fetch the time. Cloudflare’s time provision service made an error and messed up the clocks for a larger part of the nodes. The problem was compounded when the developers introduced an emergency fix that conflicted with re-enabling the time service. The testnet could have recovered on its own if they hadn’t acted at all, as one ETH developer Raul Jordan explained.

The outage caused participation to drop from 80% to 5% over the course of a few days. The testnet is almost back to full participation according to the statistics with about 75% of the nodes online. Though some believe the outage is a bad sign for Ethereum 2.0 integrity but Jordan argues that the testnets are meant to catch the issues at an early stage before they affect the users and funds:

 “It would have been really terrifying if this bug occurred with real money at stake once eth2 launched.”