Sui Blames Last Week's Trio of Network Outages on Gas and Validator Bugs

Sui network developers shared the cause behind last week’s streak of outages, with three separate periods of downtime tallying over 15 hours over a turbulent 48-hour period between Thursday and Friday.

Engineers traced the first two failures to crash bugs involving the interaction between gas charging logic and Sui release 1.72, which had introduced an address balances feature. The new functionality conflicted with existing gas calculation processes, causing validators to halt operations.

The third outage struck Friday afternoon during a scheduled epoch change, triggered by an unrelated latent bug in how validators preserve randomness state across restarts. This validator-level synchronization issue compounded the network's reliability problems despite being technically distinct from the earlier gas-related failures.

The Sui Foundation acknowledged accepting heightened risk when implementing an interim fix to restore network operations quickly while developers worked on a more robust solution.

The price of SUI creeped down over the course of the last week, currently down 18% over the last seven days at a recent price of $0.86. SUI has continued to tick down amid a broader crypto market dip on Monday, with Bitcoin hitting its lowest price in nearly two months.

The May incidents marked Sui's third major reliability failure since mainnet launch in 2023. Previous outages included a two-hour transaction scheduling bug in November 2024 and a six-hour consensus divergence in January 2026.

The technical complexity of Sui's bugs—spanning gas logic interactions and validator state management—reflects ongoing industry struggles with protocol upgrade risks at scale.