Sui Network Goes Down Three Times in 48 Hours After v1.72 Upgrade Bug

TLDR:

• • Sui Network’s v1.72 upgrade introduced a gas charging bug that caused three mainnet halts within 48 hours in May 2026.
  • No user funds were lost during the outages, and validators restored full network activity by May 30, 2026, after emergency fixes.
  • The SUI token dropped roughly 8% during the disruptions, falling below $0.89 and liquidating nearly $2M in long positions.
  • This marks Sui’s second major outage of 2026, raising ongoing concerns about upgrade testing and Layer-1 infrastructure reliability.

Sui Network suffered three mainnet halts within 48 hours, from May 28 to May 30, 2026. The disruptions traced back to a crash bug introduced in the v1.72 software upgrade.

No user funds were lost during any of the three stalls. Validators coordinated emergency fixes and restored block production by May 30.

However, the repeated downtime pushed the SUI token sharply lower and renewed questions about the chain’s infrastructure reliability.

Three Halts in 48 Hours: What Triggered the Outages

The root cause of the first outage was a crash bug in the gas charging logic introduced in version v1.72. Sui had improved gas charging in this release to more accurately estimate fees based on transaction complexity.

However, the new logic contained an edge-case defect. When a specific transaction structure appeared on the network, gas calculation would error out. This caused all validators to crash and enter a loop, halting the entire network completely.

The first halt began on May 28, 2026, at 13:48 UTC. SuiScan showed no new checkpoints, and the outage lasted five hours and 55 minutes. Validators then worked to deploy a corrected version.

Restoring the network required manual coordination across the entire validator set. Node operators identified the divergence point, purged incorrect consensus data, and deployed corrected logic.

The second and third halts followed shortly after. The outages originated from an interaction conflict between the Address Balances feature and gas billing logic introduced in version 1.72.

A temporary fix deployed earlier carried a known issue that could trigger outages with an extremely low probability — a calculated risk that backfired when epoch transition problems piled on.

The third Sui mainnet outage hit on May 29, 2026, at approximately 4:30 PM EDT. The trigger was the rollout of the long-term patch itself.

As validators restarted to deploy the new version, a latent bug in epoch transition handling froze user transactions all over again.

Sui’s official account confirmed the situation on X, stating: “Sui mainnet stopped accepting user transactions due to an issue during the epoch change beginning at ~1:30PT. Validators are up and creating system transactions, but user transactions are not currently being accepted.”

SUI Price Falls as Market Reacts to Repeated Downtime

The price of SUI dropped across all three outage periods. The SUI token dropped 8% during the incident, trading at $0.91 after falling from $0.99.

Approximately $1 billion in on-chain assets were temporarily frozen while all validators entered a crash loop. Trading activity across decentralized finance protocols on the network came to a full stop during each halt.

CoinGlass confirmed $1.88 million in network positions were liquidated in the latest wave alone. SUI traded at $0.874 as of May 31, 2026, per CoinGECKO data.

The token broke below the $0.89 level, which crypto analyst Crypto Patel noted was near the cycle low, adding that SUI was down roughly 37% in 20 days with approximately $2 million in long positions liquidated.

A complete halt in block production created operational risk considerations for exchanges, liquidity providers, and institutional participants integrated with the network.

While no funds were reported lost, the inability to process transactions for nearly six hours intensified scrutiny around infrastructure stability.

This incident marks the second major stall for Sui in 2026, following the January 14 consensus-related issue that forced the network to be deliberately paused.

In both cases, the disruptions stemmed from bugs introduced during software upgrades, with no loss or risk to user funds.

Validators completed the emergency upgrade by May 30, and network activity resumed. A full incident review from the Sui core team is expected in the coming days.

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