Telegram-Linked TON Blockchain Suffers Second Outage

Once again, the DOGS token is gumming up the works.

The TON blockchain, created by messaging app provider Telegram, encountered its second outage in as many days on Wednesday.

According to a message posted by the TON team on Telegram and X (formerly Twitter), block production issues began at 19:19 UTC, with the disruption attributed to a heavy load from the DOGS token minting.

"TON Core is working on a solution. Users' assets aren't at risk. Please update your nodes and restart," read the message, which was flagged as "urgent" and addressed to mainnet validators.

The last blocks were recorded on the chain at 12:23 Eastern time, or 16:23 UTC, according to the Tonscan block explorer.

The price of the blockchain's TON token showed little response to the latest outage, down 0.99% on a four-hour basis and 4% over 24 hours at the time of writing, according to CoinDesk data.

"As long I can finally withdraw my dogs 😅😅 - I can wait," wrote one user in a reply to the team's Telegram message.

The previous outage occurred during Asia trading hours Wednesday and lasted about six hours, with little lasting effect on the TON price, which had already taken a hit several days earlier when Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov was arrested in France.

That earlier downtime was also partially blamed on the popularity of the DOGS airdrop, which is part of the Ton Foundation's effort to raise awareness of what it believes is Durov's unjust arrest.

Edited by Marc Hochstein for Features, Opinion, Ethics and Standards. He holds BTC above CoinDesk's disclosure threshold of $1K and de minimis amounts of other digital assets (details in bio). CoinDesk was acquired Bullish, Block.one; both companies have interests