On the 21st of January, the Cardano blockchain was subject to a momentary glitch that briefly impacted some of its nodes and caused those nodes to briefly unplug and reboot.

Hoskinson offers an explanation

Hoskinson described the network glitch in a video that was live-streamed on January 23 and said that it lasted for around two minutes.

The entrepreneur said that it looks to be a temporary problem, and it’s probably a mixture of a collection of factors that occurred at the same moment, which implies that it’s doubtful that the issue will be repeated again.

The incident was caused by a transient anomaly. Such transient issues (even if they were to affect all nodes) were considered in the design of the cardano-node and Ouroboros consensus mechanism. Thus proofing the network behaved exactly as expected in this situation.

Cardano

However, the Cardano creator did say that they know where the error was called in the software and what portion of the code was damaged and that it doesn’t seem to be replicable, despite the fact that he admitted it was difficult to pin down the specific triggering event for this particular bug.

Hoskinson shared the encouraging news that Cardano performed flawlessly, just as it was designed to. According to his explanation, when a stall happens, the system essentially recovers and cures itself, which causes the nodes to rise again.

The entrepreneur conceded that this was not an ideal approach since, typically, people would want to know the root reason for any glitches in a distributed system.

Nonetheless, such systems might produce emergent problems, which are not replicable at the local level but can be triggered by a combination of factors and cause the system to halt for certain users.

No transactions were lost

According to Hoskinson, there was no loss of transactions, no decline in the number of blocks, no loss of money, and the network did not truly stop operating.

Although it came to a standstill for a short while and then recovered, the network is still making progress and is still going ahead. It was able to fix itself, which is one of the main benefits of having a decentralized distributed robust system, said Hoskinson.

The creator of Cardano has reassured the public that a team is working on the issue and will fix any bugs it discovers, whether they occur in a Haskell library or the implementation of the balanceR that was implemented to optimize Cardano.

Identifying the cause of the incident, he added, will need additional investigation.