Celo suffers a 24-hour outage

The Celo blockchain stalled at block 14,035,19 on July 14, following which its validators managed to restart the network but the success was brief, as it was halted again. At that point, validators were urged to follow instructions posted on the community’s Discord server where a node update mitigating an issue around block sizing and message capacity was shared. Following that announcement and nearly 24 hours after the initial outage, the Celo mainnet was restarted with a quorum of validators adopting the 1.5.8 version of the node software, according to an official announcement on Twitter.

Update: Celo validators have resolved the network’s first outage since mainnet launch on April 22, 2020. A thorough and expedited technical analysis is ongoing and details will be readily shared with the Celo community.
— Celo (@CeloOrg) July 15, 2022

The Celo mainnet has been running since 2020, and this is only its first outage, which was seen by many crypto enthusiasts as superior to its competitors such as Solana which is offline on a nearly monthly basis, lately. However, not everyone was that positive, as one of the network’s validators going under the name “Dee” on the Celo Discord server said the latest outage is “part of the growing pains” of the blockchain.

Celo allows users to make crypto payments using their phone numbers as a proxy for public keys, the network is EVM compatible and supports smart contracts and dApps. The project is behind three stablecoin currencies: Celo Dollars – cUSD, Celo Euros – cEUR, and Celo Reals cREAL, along its native CELO token.