Ripple's XRP Ledger Suffers Rare Outage, Halting Transactions for Over an Hour

The XRP Ledger, a blockchain technology developed by Ripple, experienced a rare outage on February 4, halting block production for over an hour. This incident, which affected the network's ability to process and record transactions, was the longest disruption in the ledger's history. Ripple's technology chief, David Schwartz, confirmed that no customer funds were lost during the network halt.

Upon investigation, Schwartz discovered that consensus was running, but validations were not being published, causing the network to drift apart. Very few Unique Node List validators made any changes, suggesting that the network spontaneously recovered. Ripple is still investigating the root cause of the network halt, as Schwartz's observations were preliminary.

The XRPL failure sparked concerns about the safety of user funds, as approximately 80,000 transactions were delayed due to the incident. However, Schwartz clarified that customer assets were not affected. The XRP Ledger's network failure comes as Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse advocates for XRP to be included as a US strategic reserve asset, which President Trump's crypto czar, David Sacks, will explore.

Following the XRPL's halt on Tuesday, XRP slumped to as low as $2.45. The industry's third-largest token has since recovered slightly to $2.53 as of publication time. XRP is still 25.5% away from its all-time high of $3.40, registered back in January 2018.