Statement on Halted SDF Validators

Updated 4:30 pm PT

San Francisco, CA — April 6, 2021 — Around 1:00 am PDT, the Stellar Development Foundation’s validator nodes temporarily stopped validating transactions on the Stellar network. At the same time, SDF's public Horizon API instance also temporarily went down. At 11:28 am PDT, the SDF nodes and the public-access Horizon were back online.

During the entirety of the SDF node downtime, the Stellar network remained online. Because it is decentralized, and the majority of Stellar network validator nodes were still functioning, the network continued to process transactions. The network itself did not halt. Additionally, many of those who run their own Horizon instance rather than relying on the public SDF instance were still able to use the API to submit transactions and query network data.

SDF’s engineering team worked quickly to resolve the situation by bringing new nodes and a new Horizon instance online. However, they continue to investigate the source of the issue.

More information about the halt, how it was resolved, and how the network worked as designed can be found on the SDF blog. An archive of the incident, with engineering updates and timeline, is also available at status.stellar.org.

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