Ripple CTO Says XRP Ledger’s Hour-Long Outage Possibly Caused by Network Drifting Apart

The XRP Ledger is now operational again after suffering an hour-long outage on Tuesday, according to David Schwartz, Ripple’s chief technology officer.

Schwartz says it’s not entirely clear what caused the network problem.

“Super-preliminary observation: It looked like consensus was running but validations were not being published, causing the network to drift apart.”

The CTO does note that no assets on the XRPL were lost during the outage.

“It just caused ledgers not to be seen as trusted for about an hour. The servers knew the network wasn’t working correctly and so did not report any ledgers as trusted during the incident…

Tentative ledgers that were produced during the incident were discarded as is normal, but no ledgers that received majority validation were lost or affected in any way. We don’t know the details yet, but it’s likely that servers refused to send validations precisely because they knew something was wrong and wanted to make sure no server accepted a ledger as fully validated when they couldn’t be sure the network would retain and eventually agree on that ledger.”

XRP is trading at $2.37 at time of writing. The 4th-ranked crypto asset by market cap is down nearly 11% in the past 24 hours.

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