XRP Ledger Briefly Unavailable Early Wednesday Due to Consensus Mechanism Design Issue

The XRP Ledger (XRPL) was briefly unavailable early Wednesday as a consensus mechanism design led to a temporary halt in network operations.

The XRP Ledger (XRPL) experienced a brief period of unavailability on Wednesday due to a consensus mechanism design that led to a temporary halt in network operations.

The incident began when the network's consensus process appeared to be functioning, but validations were not being published, causing the network's ledgers to “drift apart.” In the XRP Ledger, consensus among validators is crucial for updating the ledger with new transactions. If validators cannot agree on which transactions to include in the next ledger version, the network cannot move forward.

A “drift” in this context indicates that while the consensus protocol was technically running, validations (or confirmations of transaction sets) were not being published. At least one validator operator manually intervened to reset the network's consensus to a previously validated ledger state, although the network seemed to have rectified the problem independently, according to Ripple CTO David Schwarz in a X post following the incident.

“It's likely that servers refused to send validations precisely because they knew something was wrong,” Schwarz said, “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.

“One possible failure mode for XRPL is if all the validators think something's wrong with the network, all refuse to send any validations, and then there's no chatter to let the network reconverge. This is the 'silent network' failure,” Schwarz added.

No assets were at risk during the downtime, with XRP prices largely in line with broader bitcoin and altcoin movements.