XRP Ledger Suffers Hour-Long Outage, Community Concerned

The XRP Ledger (XRPL) experienced a temporary outage on February 4, lasting for over an hour. According to Ripple's Chief Technology Officer, David Schwartz, the ledger froze at block height 93927174 for 64 minutes before validators successfully rebooted it at 10:58 am UTC. During this time, no new validations were published, raising concerns among the XRP community about the cause of the disruption.

Schwartz took to Twitter to reassure users and share preliminary findings. He noted that consensus was running but validations were not being published, causing the network to drift apart. Validator operators manually intervened to choose a sane starting point and begin publishing validations from there. Once a few validations were issued by several sources, the network managed to re-establish consensus, bringing the ledger back on track.

RippleX, the developer-focused arm of Ripple Labs, also weighed in, confirming that the XRP Ledger has resumed forward progress and that funds were always safe. Although the XRPL has a reputation for speed and reliability, this outage underscores the broader realities of distributed ledger systems, where validator and consensus behaviors remain crucial for network stability.

This is not the first time the XRPL has faced technical difficulties. Over the past year, the ledger encountered a node crash in November 2024 and suffered full history node failures in September of the same year. Despite these challenges, the XRP price remained relatively stable, trading at approximately $2.50 with a 4% change over the last 24 hours.