Cardano: Why 60% of the Network’s Nodes Went Offline?
The Cardano blockchain suffered an anomaly on Sunday night (02:00 BST, between block 8300569 and 8300570) that caused nearly 60% of all active nodes to remain offline for a short period of time.
Although the blockchain was not shut down, there were delays in transactions. But what happened and what was the cause?
Том Stokes, co-founder and COO of Node Shark and operator of the ADA’s stacking pool was one of the first to report the anomaly:
“A few hours ago, over half of all Cardano nodes went offline. That’s why decentralization matters” and shared the chart below.
As the chart shows, the network recovered to about 87% in a short period of time. However, the cause of the incident remained unknown for quite a long time. At the time of writing, Cardano’s creator, Charles Hoskinson, had also yet to comment.
A statement from Cardano’s development company, Input Output Global (IOG), provided an explanation for the phenomenon. The company explained that an error caused nodes to break and reboot more than 50% of them.
“This affected the relay nodes and the nodes producing blocks – the edge nodes do not appear to have been affected“, said IOG, which explained that this appears to have been caused by a temporary fault that triggered one of two reactions in the node – some simply disconnected while others rebooted.
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As the company points out, the impact was fairly minor – “similar to delays that occur during normal operations.”
Most nodes recovered automatically without human intervention and performed a reboot, depending on the choice of staking pool. However, the company promises to further investigate the cause of the anomaly and implement additional monitoring logging measures in addition to “regular” monitoring procedures.
Alexander Stefanov
Reporter at CoinsPress
Alex is Editor-in-Chief of Coinspress and co-founder of Millennial Media Group, with nearly a decade of experience covering financial markets - crypto first, then everything else. It started in 2016 with Bitcoin. Like most people at the time, he didn't fully understand it - so he kept digging. Blockchain, tokenomics, the projects, the cycles. That curiosity never stopped, and eventually pulled him into traditional markets too: equities, commodities, macro. Not because he left crypto behind, but because you can't properly understand one without the other. What drives him is straightforward: he wants to know why something is happening, not just that it's happening. Most market coverage stops at the headline - price up, price down, here's a chart. Alex finds that kind of reporting actively unhelpful. If you walk away from an article without understanding the mechanism behind the move, what did you actually learn? He holds a degree in Tourism from New Bulgarian University - not the most obvious path into financial markets, but markets have a way of pulling in people who are simply too curious to stay out. He has authored over 200 in-depth analyses and more than 10,000 articles across crypto and traditional finance. He still thinks every day in markets teaches him something new. That's probably why he hasn't stopped.
