Sui Network Suffers 5-Hour Outage, Fifth Major Incident Since Launch
In brief
- Sui mainnet stalled for over five hours Thursday morning; fix rolled out by 3:40 p.m. ET.
- Second major incident in five months; January stall lasted six hours.
- SUI token fell 5.4% to $0.92; down 82% from January 2025 all-time high of $5.35.
Another Outage in Months
The Sui network experienced a similar network stall in January that lasted more than six hours. That incident came barely five months before Thursday's disruption, underscoring a pattern of infrastructure strain on the layer-1 blockchain. The network dealt with a significant validator issue in 2024 that prevented transactions from processing. For a blockchain built to compete on speed and reliability, the cadence of downtime is becoming harder to ignore.
Token Takes a Hit
The SUI token fell 5.4% in the last 24 hours to trade at $0.92 during the downtime. The price pressure reflects broader weakness in the asset. The SUI token made a new all-time high of $5.35 in January 2025 but has since fallen more than 82%. That collapse happened even as SUI ETFs from Canary and Grayscale were launched earlier in the year, offering exposure to the SUI token and staking rewards to traditional investors.
Built for Speed, Plagued by Stalls
Launched in 2023, the network was developed by Mysten Labs, a spinoff of Meta's Diem project. The network previously raised $300 million in a Series B round valuing it at $2 billion in 2022. Built to compete with other speedy layer-1 blockchains, the Sui network has once more suffered from the same ills that plague many high-throughput chains. The repeated stalls suggest that scaling speed without sacrificing uptime remains a formidable engineering challenge.
