TON blockchain has been down for over six hours now

According to on-chain data, the Open Network (TON) has been experiencing an outage after no transaction has been processed for six hours.

Tonscan data showed that the Telegram-linked blockchain stopped producing new blocks at around 10:11 p.m. UTC on Tuesday. As the cessation grew longer, Binance and Bybit exchange temporarily suspended deposits and withdrawals to and from the network.

“TON Blockchain is currently experiencing a disruption in block production,” TON said in an X post. “The issue is occurring due to the abnormal load currently on TON. Several validators are unable to clean the database of old transactions, which has led to losing the consensus.”

The network called validators to restart at 4 a.m. UTC on Wednesday. “If enough validators will restart, consensus will be reestablished.” and has not responded to The Block’s request for comments.

While TON has not provided an update since, the TON Status group on Telegram, which the network developers run, reported insufficient validators to restart nodes with the correct flags for mainnet validators with an index under 100. It called for those who have not yet restarted their nodes with the new flags to do so promptly.

“So far, not enough validators have restarted their nodes with correct flags. If you haven't restarted your nodes with new flags yet, please do so ASAP,” it said .

X user @maverickqe, who claims to be the strategic advisor to the TON Society, said earlier that the DOGS memecoin airdrop has sparked a surge in transactions, overloading the network. “Garbage collection overloaded many of [the] validators for enough time for them to lose consensus,” the X user wrote. 

The Telegram-based memecoin DOGS garnered significant attention within the crypto community as its developers outlined plans to expand the token's utility within the Telegram ecosystem. DOGS launched its airdrop event on Monday, where it said 81.5% of the fixed supply of 550 billion tokens would go to community members. Last week, DOGS said six million verified users requested the airdrop.

The situation unfolded after Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov's arrest by French authorities last week, which sparked a massive backlash from Telegram and TON communities. On Tuesday, a Telegram mini-app started a letter advocating for French authorities to release Durov. The letter has since gained nearly 1.7 million signatures. 

Meanwhile, the network’s native token, Toncoin, fell 2.14% in the past 24 hours to trade at $5.27, according to The Block’s Toncoin price page .