On Sunday the 29th of December, members of the IOTA community could not handle transactions on the network. This problem lasted for precisely 24 hours, ending on Monday, December 30.
Now, IOTA has officially explained the incident in a recent official publication. According to the statement, the network freeze was an automatic response by the network, to a possible hack.
“The incident was caused by an edge case in transaction structuring. An unusual set of transactions, which may have been constructed as an attack, disrupted ledger state calculation. When the nodes faced issues calculating a consistent ledger state, they reverted to rejecting milestones as a safety mechanism.”
The statement was written by the IOTA Foundation Director of Engineering, Jakub Cech. It further assures the IOTA community that even during the incident, individual funds were still safe. Cech also insists that the problem was not caused by a software upgrade or anything else from IOTA.
The publication further goes into some specifics about the incident, stating that the problem was at the IOTA Reference Implementation (IRI) level. IOTA states that the IRI could not handle an edge case where transactions are shared between distinct bundles. To solve the issue, IOTA released a new IRI version, v1.8.3, the following day.
Earlier this year, Europol arrested a hacker who stole more than 10 million euro worth of IOTA, from more than 85 people.
Image Credits: Pixabay
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