Sui Attributes Three Mainnet Outages to Upgrade Vulnerabilities

ChainCatcher report, according to The Block, the Sui Foundation has released an incident analysis report on the three recent mainnet outages, attributing the three network disruptions last Thursday and Friday to two independent vulnerabilities introduced by the v1.72 upgrade. The first outage lasted approximately six and a half hours; the second and third occurred on Friday morning and afternoon, respectively. The first two outages stemmed from a flaw in the transaction fee deduction mechanism exposed by the "address balance" feature introduced in v1.72: when a transaction was canceled due to insufficient funds, the network still spent those funds, resulting in negative balances that caused validator nodes to crash during reconciliation. The Foundation acknowledged that the emergency patch deployed on Thursday carried known risks of further disruption, and the team accepted this risk to rapidly restore on-chain services, leading to another outage early Friday. The third outage was triggered by another previously undisclosed random state vulnerability that occurred when validator nodes restarted to install the patch. Sui stated that user funds were never at risk; both vulnerabilities have been fixed, and a mechanism to forcibly terminate stalled epochs has been implemented. The Foundation also noted that AI agents with access to its production systems significantly accelerated the diagnostic process.