The Sui Foundation confirmed that its mainnet experienced three distinct service interruptions between May 28 and May 29, 2026. According to a post-mortem report published by the foundation on Sunday, the outages were triggered by interactions between a new address-balance feature introduced in the v1.72 release and the network’s existing gas and consensus logic.
The initial halt began at approximately 7 a.m. PT on Thursday and lasted nearly seven hours. The foundation reported that this disruption stemmed from an edge case in the network's gas-charging logic, specifically concerning how the system handled transactions that utilized a mix of the new address-balance feature and traditional coin objects. In these instances, an underflow error caused validator nodes to crash when a transaction was canceled due to insufficient funds, yet the system still attempted to process the gas payment.
To restore network operations by 1:30 p.m. PT on Thursday, the core development team deployed an interim fix. The foundation acknowledged in its review that this patch was a temporary measure, noting that it carried a "known issue with a low probability of causing a halt." The development team opted to accept this risk to prioritize a rapid restoration of the mainnet.
That risk materialized early Friday morning. Around 5 a.m. PT, a second outage occurred when a transaction triggered a masked variant of the initial bug, bypassing the interim patch. This failure necessitated a more robust solution, which validators completed and adopted by 9:40 a.m. PT on Friday.
The third halt was a secondary consequence of the recovery process. As validators restarted their systems to apply the final fix, the network's on-chain randomness protocol failed to reach the required participation threshold. Consequently, the protocol disabled itself automatically, leading to the final disruption.
While the Sui Foundation maintains that no user funds were lost and no transactions were reversed, the incidents have impacted market confidence. CoinDesk reported that the SUI token fell approximately 19% over the course of the week. These outages represent the third major reliability failure for the Layer-1 blockchain since its mainnet launch in 2023.
