The Sui Foundation has published a post-mortem analysis detailing the cause of three separate mainnet outages that occurred within a 48-hour period on May 28 and May 29, 2026. The investigation traces all three halts to a bug introduced in the network’s v1.72 software release.
The root cause was an interaction between a new address-balance feature shipped in the update and the blockchain’s existing gas-charging logic. This exposed a rare edge case that caused validators to crash under specific transaction conditions.
The first outage began at approximately 7 a.m. PT on Thursday, May 28, and lasted for about seven hours. It was triggered by a transaction that attempted to pay fees using a mix of the new feature and traditional coin objects. When the transaction was canceled for insufficient funds, a bug in the gas-smashing routine led to an underflow error, crashing validators.
To restore service quickly, the core team implemented an interim fix around 1:30 p.m. PT. This patch addressed the most common manifestation of the bug but carried a known, low-probability risk of triggering another halt. The team accepted this risk to bring the mainnet back online while developing a permanent solution.
That known risk materialized the following morning. A second outage began around 5 a.m. PT on Friday, May 29. A transaction triggered a masked variant of the original bug where an insufficient-funds error was overridden by another cancellation reason, bypassing the interim patch. A more robust fix was completed and adopted by validators by 9:40 a.m. PT.
The third halt was a direct consequence of the second. When validators restarted to install the new fix, participation in the protocol responsible for generating on-chain randomness fell below the required threshold. As designed, the randomness feature disabled itself.
A latent bug then failed to properly save this disabled state. When validators restarted again, they were unaware that randomness had been turned off. This caused the next epoch change to stall for nearly six hours as randomness-dependent transactions accumulated in a paused queue.
The Sui Foundation emphasized that no user funds were at risk during any of the incidents and no committed transactions were reverted. The price of the network’s native SUI token dropped approximately 8% during the cascade of outages, hitting a low of $0.90. As of Monday, it was trading near that level, down about 19% for the week.
These events mark the third major reliability incident for the Sui network since its mainnet launch in 2023. Previous incidents included a two-hour transaction scheduling bug in November 2024 and a six-hour consensus divergence in January 2026.
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