The Sui blockchain’s recent performance has raised alarms as it suffered its third outage in less than 48 hours, leading to substantial liquidations among traders. Data indicates that leveraged traders betting on a swift price recovery were particularly hard hit, with $1.72 million of the total $1.88 million in SUI liquidations recorded during the latest disruption, according to figures from CoinGlass.
The ripple effect on the market was immediate. SUI, the blockchain’s native token, plummeted to $0.9035 on Binance following the third stall, marking an approximate 8% decline since the disruptions started on May 28. The once-stable $1.00 support level that had held for most of 2024 was breached, resulting in a 16% drop over the week.
The Latest Outage Details
The third outage occurred during an epoch transition on May 29 at around 4:30 PM EDT. While validators were operational and generating system transactions, user transactions came to a standstill. The Sui Core Team acknowledged the issue, stating, “Sui mainnet stopped accepting user transactions due to an issue during the epoch change beginning at approximately 1:30 PM PT. Validators are up and creating system transactions, but user transactions are not currently being accepted. The Sui Core Team is investigating, and updates will be shared.”
After a thorough investigation, the team identified the failure as a result of a latent bug affecting how a specific failure state is preserved across validator restarts. This bug hindered the network’s ability to transition to the next epoch effectively. A fix was deployed shortly thereafter, allowing the network to come back online.
Tracing the Outages
The troubles for Sui began on May 28, when a crash bug in the gas charging logic, introduced in version 1.72 of Sui’s software, caused the mainnet to halt for nearly six hours. Following this, the network resumed operations only to experience another major outage just hours later on May 29 at 12:19 PM UTC.
The Sui team noted that the interim fix implemented to address the first outage had only partially resolved the issue, leading to a recurrence of the same underlying problem. Service was restored around 11:34 AM EDT, but the stability was short-lived as the third outage struck later that afternoon.
Reports suggest that all three outages trace back to changes in the gas charging logic, which were intended to support zero-fee stablecoin transfers on the network. This pattern of outages raises concerns over the reliability of the Sui blockchain, particularly as it has encountered significant disruptions multiple times within the year.
In 2026 alone, Sui has faced three notable incidents, including a six-hour consensus divergence event in January and a congestion-related outage in November 2024. The Sui team has committed to conducting a detailed review of these incidents to prevent future occurrences.
Featured image from Driver Easy, chart from TradingView
