Filecoin network suffers temporary outage

Decentralized storage protocol Filecoin (FIL) came to a standstill on Dec. 19 as a bug caused instability on the network. According to a project status report issued by the Filecoin team:

“The Filecoin network is halted with most nodes stuck at height 336459 with mismatched state compute error due to indeterminate behavior.”

Based on the timeline given in the status update, it took less than four hours for the Filecoin dev team to fix the problem. As part of the solution, miners had to upgrade to the new Lotus client.

Due to the network outage, exchanges like HBTC and KuCoin served notices to their users, announcing the suspension of FIL deposits and withdrawals. As of press time, both platforms are yet to reverse the decision.

Indeed, the Filecoin team advised exchanges to disable deposits and withdrawals until they are comfortable with the status of the chain. FIL is currently down more than 7% over the last 24-hour trading period.

According to TokenSoft CEO Mason Borda, the network outage did not affect Wrapped Filecoin (wFIL). As previously reported by Cointelegraph, Tokensoft and Anchorage launched wFIL for use on Ethereum back in November.

At the time, Filecoin had just crossed the 1 exbibyte, or EiB, network storage threshold, equivalent to about 1 billion gigabytes. This figure now stands at 1.48 EiB with over 854 active miners according to the data from the Filecoin dashboard.