Sui Foundation explains three consecutive mainnet halts

Sui Foundation has detailed the causes behind three consecutive mainnet outages that struck on Thursday and Friday, tracing them to two separate bugs introduced in the v1.72 upgrade. The first two halts stemmed from a gas-charging bug exposed by the newly deployed "address balances" feature, while an interim fix applied under time pressure carried a known low-probability halt risk — one that subsequently materialized.

The third halt emerged when validators restarted to install the fix and encountered a latent bug in how the network preserves randomness settings. Sui Foundation confirmed that all three bugs have since been patched, no user funds were at risk at any point, and no settled transactions were reverted.

As a structural response, Sui has built a mechanism to force-close a stalled epoch, reducing the risk of prolonged outages if similar conditions arise in the future. The incident raises questions about upgrade testing and rollout discipline on a network that positions itself as a high-throughput, low-latency Layer 1.