Sui Foundation said three mainnet halts on Thursday and Friday traced back to two separate bugs introduced in the v1.72 upgrade. The first two halts were tied to a gas-charging bug exposed by the new "address balances" feature, and a rushed interim fix carried a known low-probability halt risk that subsequently triggered a third stop.
The third halt happened when validators restarted to install the patch and hit a latent bug in how the network preserves randomness settings during epoch transitions. Sui said the bugs are now fixed, no user funds were at risk, and no settled transactions were reverted.
Why it matters
Three halts inside roughly 36 hours is a serious reliability event for a network pitching itself as high-throughput infrastructure for institutional and consumer-grade applications. Even when funds are safe, repeated mainnet stops erode the trust case Sui has been building against more established L1s.
Market impact
The Foundation also disclosed it has built a mechanism to force-close a stalled epoch — the actual structural fix that should prevent this failure mode from cascading the next time a validator set restarts mid-transition. The disclosure is forward-looking: the bugs are patched, but the operational lesson is that v1.72 shipped with insufficient staging for a load-bearing feature like address balances.
Frequently asked questions
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What caused the three Sui mainnet halts on Thursday and Friday?
Sui Foundation attributed the halts to two separate bugs introduced in the v1.72 upgrade: a gas-charging bug exposed by the new address balances feature, and a known low-probability halt risk carried by a rushed interim fix.
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Was a third bug involved in the Sui halts?
Yes. The third halt was triggered by a latent bug in how the network preserves randomness settings when validators restarted to install the patch.
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Were user funds or settled transactions affected by the Sui halts?
Sui Foundation said no user funds were at risk and no settled transactions were reverted across any of the three halts.
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What structural fix has Sui implemented after the halts?
The Foundation disclosed it has built a mechanism to force-close a stalled epoch, designed to prevent the same restart-mid-transition failure from cascading in the future.
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What is the v1.72 address balances feature linked to the Sui halts?
It is the new feature in the v1.72 upgrade that exposed the gas-charging bug responsible for the first two halts; a rushed patch for that flaw then carried its own halt risk.
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