A fault in leading layer-1 blockchain Sui’s gas charging system brought the blockchain to a standstill for the third time this year on Friday, with block production halting for over three hours and thirty minutes before validators pushed through an emergency fix.
The last block before the disruption landed at approximately 11:51 UTC, according to the Suiscan block explorer. Mainnet activity did not return until around 3:30 UTC. The Sui team acknowledged the situation publicly, noting that network activity “may be paused.”
Engineers traced the problem to the network’s 1.72 software release, the same update responsible for Thursday’s nearly six-hour outage. “Both today’s and yesterday’s halts are due to the interaction of the 1.72 release, which introduced address balances and gas charging logic. Yesterday’s implemented fix was an interim measure designed to restore functionality to the network,” the Sui team said.
That interim measure came with a caveat. The team acknowledged it carried a low probability of causing further disruption, which is exactly what happened. Getting the network back online required more than two-thirds of stakeholders to adopt the permanent fix before block production could restart,
Thursday’s crash, which the team attributed to a crash bug in the gas charging logic, had already been classified as the second major outage of 2026. Friday’s stall now pushes that count to three.
The first disruption hit in January, when a consensus bug knocked the network offline for more than six hours. The outage from validators submitting conflicting transactions to the protocol’s checkpoint mechanism, preventing the network from reaching the threshold needed to move forward, according to Sui’s post-mortem report.
