High-performance blockchain Sui Network suffered a more than six-hour outage, its second multi-hour crash since January, freezing hundreds of millions of dollars in decentralized applications.
Sui Network Crashes for Six Hours, Token Drops
29 May 2026 - 10:01 CEST
SUI drops during outage
The core validator network of Sui, created by Mysten Labs, experienced a consensus breakdown at 14:15UTC on 28 May, stalling all block production and network settlement that did not resume until 20:32UTC, according to Sui’s status page.
Sui's native token, SUI, fell as much as 5% during the freeze. According to CoinMarketCap, the token’s price drop erased roughly $180mn to $220mn from Sui’s circulating market cap, dragging it to around $3.6bn at the low.
According to DeFiLlama's Sui Network Tracker, roughly $537mn in total value locked (TVL) within decentralized applications was trapped during the outage.
User funds safe
In an X post, Sui said the halt had been due to a "crash bug in the gas charging logic introduced by the 1.72 release," and that a full incident report would be shared "in the coming days." An in-built safety mechanism prevented any fund movement, keeping user funds secure.
The issue arose from a software defect in the internal calculator built into the Sui blockchain that determines exactly how much transaction fee, or gas, a user must pay to execute an action on the network.
The flaw led to a cascading consensus failure, triggering a network suspension until a patch was deployed. The network went back online after more than two-thirds of the validator stake successfully upgraded to the fix.
Update triggered prior crash
In a previous crash this year, the Sui mainnet experienced a nearly six-hour outage on 14 Jan, which was caused by a synchronization bug during a protocol update that halted consensus among validators.
At that time, more than $1bn in liquidity was temporarily frozen, but the network's safety protocols prevented a fork. Operations resumed after a patch from Mysten Labs.
Network trust at stake
While network outages are not uncommon, the stakes have become higher as Layer-1 blockchains (base blockchains that settle their own transactions) vie for institutional users and market share. Sui Network has been positioned as an alternative to the Solana protocol, which is much larger by market cap, and markets its transaction speed, network reliability under heavy traffic and developer asset safety.
Mysten was founded in 2021 by a team of cryptography and distributed systems engineers who previously led Meta’s Novi Research division.
