Users of IOTA, the 24th biggest cryptocurrency past market cap, were unable to confirm transactions for 24 hours due to a mainnet incident on December. 29.

Co-ordinate to an official statement on the event, the IOTA network experienced a mainnet incident that began at 2:50 AM UTC on December. 29, and was fully resolved by ii:l AM UTC on December. 30.

The incident was caused by an unusual gear up of transactions that may have been constructed as an attack

As described in a Dec. 30 blog post by Iota Foundation, the problem was caused by issues at the IOTA Reference Implementation (IRI) — open-source Java software that defines the IOTA protocol that runs on nodes in the public IOTA networks, where clients tin can transport IOTA tokens to each other. Specifically, the incident was caused past an edge case in transaction structuring that may have been constructed as an attack, the firm suggested.

The root cause lies in the fact that the IRI wasn't able to handle an edge case where transactions are shared between multiple separate bundles, the post reads. Once the IRI marked a transaction as "already deemed for" in i package, it was ignored in the next parcel, which resulted in a corrupt ledger state from which the node was unable to recover, Iota Foundation explained. Additionally, the outcome caused Iota'due south dedicated network coordinator to terminate the issuance of farther milestones.

Iota Foundation hasn't seen any known incidents with the same root crusade to date, the blog mail service notes.

The firm emphasized that the incident wasn't caused by software changes or any other components of the network but rather occured due to the "absence of transaction processing logic for an unusual set of transactions."

New IRI version is released to fix the incident

In society to prepare the problem, Iota Foundation released a new version of IRI, v1.8.3, at 01:58 UTC on Dec. 30. The new IRI version immune the coordinator to resume the service, which subsequently led to healthy confirmation rate and stable milestone issuance rate. Equally Iota mainnet fully resumed operation at 02:55 UTC, major crypto exchange Huobi after resumed deposits and withdrawals of IOTA after announcing a temporary suspension on December. 29.

Following the incident, the IOTA token has seen a notable sell-off and slipped over 4% over the by 24 hours to trade at $0.159 as of press time, according to Coin360. Withal, the altcoin is all the same slightly up from its intraweek low of $0.158.

IOTA seven-day price chart. Source: Coin360

IOTA seven-solar day toll chart. Source: Coin360

Concluding week, major crypto payment processor BitPay confirmed that its service was down for over iii hours as the company was working to gear up transaction bug.