Avalanche encountered a significant setback on Friday when it failed to produce blocks for over four hours, disrupting its operations. Developers swiftly responded by releasing a software patch to address the issue, which involved disabling a logic loophole that allowed an “excessive amount of gossip” among validators.

The interruption began at 11:13 UTC, prompting immediate investigation by the network’s developers. By 15:59, a software upgrade had been deployed to Avalanche nodes, resolving the issue by curbing unnecessary data exchange between validator nodes. This optimization alleviated the strain on the network, allowing block finalization to resume at 16:36 UTC.

The buggy logic in question caused each node to saturate its allocated bandwidth with redundant transaction gossip, hindering the processing of pull queries issued by validators and leading to consensus stalling. However, the prompt deployment of the software patch mitigated these issues, restoring network functionality.

While initially speculated to be related to a new inscription wave on Avalanche, co-founder Kevin Sekniqi clarified that this was not the primary cause of the outage and did not impact performance. Despite the disruption, Avalanche’s native token (AVAX) experienced a modest 3% decline, underperforming compared to the broader market.

This incident echoes a similar outage experienced by rival blockchain Solana earlier this month, highlighting the challenges faced by layer-1 blockchains in managing heavy network congestion and maintaining uninterrupted operations.