On May 31, the Sui Network team officially shared a detailed report on the recent incident outages between May 28 and May 30. This report breaks down the issues with important details. This report explains the mechanism of gas charging logic that appeared after the 1.72 upgrade.
Following last week’s outages related to the 1.72 release, the Sui Core Team has completed an investigation and incident review, detailing what happened and the steps taken by validators to restart the network.
— Sui (@SuiNetwork) MAY 31, 2026
According to the report, these outages mainly happened due to bugs in the latest software update in version 1.72. These new updates have introduced new address balances to make gas payments and fund storage. During this outage, there were no users’ funds harmed.
During these outages, the network has stopped producing new blocks. Also, it has stopped executing new transactions, which affected decentralized finance applications, trading, and other dApps.
During this phase, the cryptocurrency has witnessed a small downfall. According to CoinMarketCap, the SUI is trading at around $0.8708 with a 4% drop, thanks to $3.49 billion in market capitalization.
The first outage took place on May 28 and lasted for around 6 hours. After this, on May 29, the network experienced two major outages.
Sui Team Explains Details of Outages In Report
The Sui team has broken down their investigation report into three parts.
Part 1- Gas Smashing
The software update 1.72 has introduced a new feature on the network, which is known as address balances. This feature will allow users to pay directly from their account balances for gas fees instead of using separate coins. However, this method is optional, and the user can also choose another method.
In this new feature, the network merges the different coins into a single coin to accept transactions before the system charges any kind of gas fees. This system will also be implemented for failed or cancelled transactions.
“The root cause of the outage issues involved an edge case in gas smashing during hybrid gas payments. If a reservation attempts to overdraft an address balance while determining if the transaction has enough gas to meet its budget, the attempt is blocked and the transaction is marked as cancelled with InsufficientFundsForWithdraw,” stated in the official report.
The report added, “However, during subsequent gas smashing, the same reservation object attempts an overdraft again. Essentially, the transaction is cancelled because the address balance didn’t have enough funds, but then gas smashing spends those same funds.”
Part 2 – Masked Error
In the investigation, the Sui team has found out that there are some “shortcomings” in the temporary fix. In this, users were able to cancel a single transaction for more than one reason at the same time.
“For example, a transaction using address balances waiting to touch a hot shared object might be cancelled due to too many higher priority transactions accessing the same object, then also be cancelled due to InsufficientFundsForWithdraw when a different transaction spends from the same address balance,” stated in the report.
This has bypassed the temporary fix, and it has created the same underflow crash, which resulted in the outage on Friday.
Part 3 – Epoch Change and Randomness Bug
After the initial outage on the Sui blockchain, when the team restarted the network to implement a second fix, there were not enough validators participating in the process that can generate random numbers for the next period. These were important numbers for some transactions.
Because of less numbers of validators during the second fix, the process has crashed and switched off the random number feature from the network. However, there was a bug in the system, as this system was not able to recall that the feature had failed after the restart. It means that when the validators have restarted the network without knowing that the feature was off.
