In a surprise to the crypto community, Phantom Wallet—a popular wallet on the Solana blockchain—faced an unexpected service outage today. A surge of users attempting to claim their Grass token airdrop led to downtime, leaving users without access for roughly two hours.
What Triggered the Downtime?
The outage came on the heels of the highly anticipated Grass token airdrop. Phantom Wallet announced via its official X account that it was handling an “uptime incident” due to overwhelming user demand. The airdrop, which aimed to distribute tokens to 2 million Grass Network users, caused a spike in traffic, ultimately leading to system instability and a brief service shutdown.
Service Impacts and User Concerns
Our services should be working well for most users now.
The team will continue to actively monitor the situation.
We appreciate everyone’s patience. We’re taking all necessary steps to prevent issues like this in the future.
— Phantom (@phantom) October 28, 2024
During the downtime, users reported issues including inaccurate account balances and difficulties in processing urgent transactions. The Phantom team’s official status page labelled the situation a “major incident,” leading to heightened user concerns. In response, Phantom recommended that users ignore simulation errors and try accessing their accounts through decentralized applications (dApps) as an alternative.
Full Recovery Announced
Fortunately, the Phantom team swiftly resolved the issue. They reported that all services have been restored, and the platform is now fully operational. Phantom assured users that their team would “continue to actively monitor the situation” to prevent future incidents of this nature.
The temporary disruption underscores the challenges posed by high-demand events such as large-scale airdrops, which can overload even established platforms. Phantom’s commitment to active monitoring and swift issue resolution should reassure users moving forward, though the incident highlights the growing need for scalability as the blockchain ecosystem expands.