The Open network suffered a seven-hour outage as memecoin degens raced to claim DOGS tokens.
The Open Network (TON), the Layer 1 blockchain integrated with the popular encrypted messaging app, Telegram, has resumed block production following a roughly seven-hour outage.
On Aug. 28, TON posted on social media that it was again producing blocks after the network went offline on Tuesday night.
TON attributed the incident to an “abnormal load” placed on the network, leaving multiple validators unable to clean their databases of old transactions, resulting in a consensus failure.
Block production resumed after a coordinated restart from validators.
Memecoin overload
The timing of the incident originally appeared conspicuous, with Telegram’s CEO currently being detained by French authorities following a weekend arrest.
However, both onlookers and the TON team attributed the outage to the network failing a network stress-test caused by the airdrop for DOGS, a Telegram-native memecoin.
On Aug. 26, Mikko Ohtamaa, the co-founder of Trading Strategy AI, tweeted that core TON infrastructure was failing amid the airdrop. On the same day, TON estimated users were requesting DOGS claims at a rate of 150,000 times per minute.
Ohtamaa shared data showing that TON was failing to process more than an average of 280 transactions per second (TPS) during the drop. Ohtamaa noted that TON had estimated a theoretical network throughput limit of 55,000 TPS.
One day later, Justin, a member of the TON Foundation, confirmed that DOGS had caused a transaction overload resulting in the outage, stating the influx of activity “overloaded many of validators for enough time for them to lose consensus.”
The network has processed between 98.5 TPS and 164.5 TPS since resuming operations, according to data from Tonviewer.
Despite the drama, the price of TON is up 0.7% over the past 24 hours, according to The Defiant’s crypto price feeds.
Durov’s arrest
The disruptions came as Telegram’s CEO remains in the custody of French authorities after getting arrested on Saturday.
Durov is accused of complicity in a slew of cybercrimes including narcotics sales, the distribution of child pornography, and money laundering allegedly facilitated on Telegram for failing to enforce a content moderation program on the platform.
The French Center for Combating Digital Crimes and National Anti-Fraud Office are currently investigating the allegations.
