TechFlow reported on January 16 that the Sui Foundation announced the Sui mainnet experienced approximately six hours of network downtime on January 14, 2026. The outage was caused by an internal divergence in validator consensus processing, which prevented the validation of new checkpoints. This incident was unrelated to network congestion or transaction volume, but rather stemmed from a boundary case error in the consensus commit logic.
During the outage, transaction submissions timed out and could not be executed, but network security mechanisms operated normally, ensuring users' funds remained completely safe, with no state rollback or double-spending occurring. Read operations continued to provide access to the latest validated state throughout the event.
Sui engineers and the validator community responded swiftly, diagnosing the issue, implementing a fix, and deploying updated binary files to successfully restore the network. The team is now focused on improving detection and recovery speed, developing automation tools, and strengthening test validation to reduce recovery time for any similar future incidents.
