Sui’s mainnet experienced two outages in just 48 hours due to a software issue in v1.72, causing an issue with transaction activities and time transitions.
According to Sui Network official status Update on
The failure affected validator consensus during time shifts, temporarily preventing the finality of the transaction across the network.
Sui hangs twice after v1.72 upgrade
Sui first encountered a full mainnet booth on May 28, 2026, when Bug in v1.72 The release caused validators to stop processing user transactions.
According to Sui’s status page, the outage lasted for 5 hours and 55 minutes before service was restored after a coordinated validator upgrade exceeded the threshold required for recovery.
The network resumed operations before being halted again on May 29 during the transition. Validators were unable to finalize a consistent network state, resulting in another outage in transaction processing.
Later, Sui admitted that the second outage was a result of the same basic issue with how address credits work with the gas fee structure. The team stated that the first solution was only temporary and failed to resolve the clash. The outage occurred as a result of the changes introduced by update v1.72.
According to Sui, the new address balances feature unexpectedly interacted with existing gas accounting logic during time shifts, resulting in a consensus-level failure that prevented validators from agreeing on the next network state.
Although validators remained online and continued internal system activity, they were unable to terminate user transactions until emergency fixes were deployed.
During the first outage, the network remained down until more than two-thirds of the validators involved upgraded their software and restored consensus.
The price of SUI drops as users experience delayed transactions
Market data collected from large exchanges indicated that SUI was trading at around $0.91-$0.92 on May 29, which translates to a roughly 7%-8% decline in price for the day.
Trading activity increased during the outage due to users interacting with halted network operations and delayed transaction confirmations.
Although user balances remained intact on the blockchain network, operations were interrupted, such as slow token transfers, temporarily halted DeFi transactions, and the inability to transact and trade NFTs.
These incidents highlighted execution risks for traders and DeFi users who rely on timely settlement of transactions.
Sui faces its second major disruption in 2026
The May outages marked the second time during the year that Sui experienced a major network failure.
During January 2026, there was a different type of consensus issue that caused an outage lasting about five to six hours due to validators failing to validate the new checkpoints.
While the January and May incidents had different technical causes, both required coordinated intervention from the verifier to restore normal operations.
Sui confirmed on May 30 that the network had returned to normal operations after auditors implemented an emergency fix.
According to the team, a full post-incident review will be published soon, detailing the interaction between the address credits feature and gas accounting during time shifts.
Now, developers are monitoring whether the feature needs to be redesigned, whether gas accounting needs to be further separated from the consensus process, and what other measures are needed to avoid such transition issues in the future.
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