Sui attributed the three mainnet interruptions to upgrade vulnerabilities, with known interruption risks before the fix

According to The Block, the Sui Foundation released an incident analysis report on the recent three interruptions of the mainnet, attributing the three network outages that occurred last Thursday and Friday to two independent vulnerabilities introduced by the v1.72 version upgrade. The first interruption lasted about six and a half hours, while the second and third occurred on Friday morning and afternoon, respectively.

The first two interruptions were caused by the "address balance" feature introduced in v1.72, which exposed flaws in the transaction fee deduction method. When a transaction was canceled due to insufficient funds, the network would still spend those funds, resulting in a negative balance that caused the validation node reconciliation process to crash. The foundation acknowledged that the temporary fix pushed urgently on Thursday carried known interruption risks, and the team accepted this risk to quickly restore on-chain services, which led to another network interruption on Friday morning.

The third interruption was triggered by another undisclosed random state vulnerability, occurring when the validation nodes restarted to install the fix patch. Sui stated that user funds were never at risk, that both vulnerabilities have been fixed, and that a mechanism to forcibly terminate stalled epochs has been established. The foundation also mentioned that AI agents with access to its production systems significantly accelerated the diagnostic process.