Solana Faces Significant DDoS Attack: Co-Founder Offers Positive Perspective

This week, Solana's co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko announced that the network is experiencing a substantial distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, peaking at around six terabits per second (Tbps). Despite the attack's scale, Yakovenko remains optimistic, dubbing it “bullish.” He believes that the overwhelming traffic indicates significant interest in the blockchain.

Key Takeaways

Solana is currently under a DDoS attack, with traffic peaks reportedly reaching six Tbps.
Co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko described the attack as “bullish,” indicating strong interest in the network.
The attack is considered one of the largest in internet history.
Solana has a history of downtimes, with several incidents linked to similar DDoS-like causes.
Compared to Bitcoin, which boasts over 99.99% uptime, Solana has experienced several notable outages.

A “Bullish” Perspective on the DDoS Attack

Anatoly Yakovenko shared on Dec. 9 that Solana has been subjected to a six Tbps DDoS attack. Raj Gokal, Solana Labs' co-founder and president, mentioned on Tuesday that the attack might still be ongoing, although Cointelegraph has not been able to confirm its authenticity independently.

David Rhodus, CEO of the decentralized physical infrastructure network Pipe Network, noted that the traffic levels signify an “industrial-scale” attack, describing it as one of the largest in internet history, with six Tbps corresponding to billions of packets flooding the network per second.

A DDoS attack occurs when numerous devices bombard a specific network with traffic to overwhelm it, causing it to slow down or go offline. Pipe Network's data suggest that this is the fourth most significant DDoS attack recorded. However, it is worth noting that other attacks recorded in 2025 reached even greater widths, including a massive 29.7 Tbps attack by Cloudflare.

Yakovenko labeled the attack as “bullish,” implying a level of resilience, and remarked that “someone is spending as much as the chain makes in revenue to send it.” Pipe Network similarly observed that, typically under such conditions, one would expect significant latency, missed blocks, or delays in confirmations, yet Solana displayed no substantial stress during the attack.

Data on DDoS Attack from Pipe Network
Source: Pipe Network

Solana’s Outage Record and Responses

Solana has faced various downtimes over the years, many of which were associated with DDoS or similar incidents. For instance, in December 2020, a block propagation bug disrupted the network operations. In September 2021, the Solana mainnet experienced an impressive 17-hour downtime when an on-chain initial DEX offering by Grape Protocol overwhelmed the system, mimicking the effects of a DDoS attack.

In 2022, the network suffered from three different downtime events: one lasting seven hours due to transaction spam, another of four and a half hours resulting from a consensus failure, and a third one spanning 8.5 hours caused by issues with the fork choice rules.

In 2023, only one case of downtime was noted when a flaw in Solana’s deduplication logic led to almost 19 hours of inactivity. In 2024, the network encountered another downtime of nearly five hours due to a different bug.

While the frequency of downtime seems to be decreasing, Solana's total outages remain considerable by blockchain standards. In contrast, Bitcoin, the leading cryptocurrency, enjoys over 99.99% uptime, with the last significant downtime incident occurring back in 2013. Only two downtime incidents have been recorded for Bitcoin since its initiation in 2009, underscoring its stability.

Bitcoin Uptime Statistics
Bitcoin uptime chart. Source: BitBo