Sui Mainnet Goes Down Again for a Second Day as SUI Slides 20% on the Week
Sui's mainnet suffered another halt early Friday, extending disruptions into a second consecutive day for the Layer 1 blockchain. The team said on-chain activity had stalled and that core engineers were investigating. Network trackers showed no new blocks had been produced for nearly two hours at the time of the alert.
The repeat stoppage has reignited concerns about reliability, coming soon after a major protocol update. SUI fell another 2% on Friday, drifting toward $0.89 as traders priced in added operational risk.
Thursday's outage was the more severe episode, lasting 5 hours and 55 minutes, the longest recorded on the project's official status page. Validators later applied a patch that restored operations, but the fix did not hold into Friday.
The team linked Thursday's halt to a flaw in gas-charging logic introduced in the latest upgrade. A full postmortem has not been published, leaving uncertainty over whether Friday's stall shares the same root cause or reflects a regression tied to the rushed patch.
The problematic release was version 1.72, billed as a meaningful modernization of transaction architecture and containing two major additions. Focus has centered on the gas accounting subsystem, where the bug is alleged to have produced an unrecoverable state during normal execution. Validator telemetry suggested at least two-thirds of the set had installed the corrective patch before Friday's renewed stall, raising questions about consensus resilience and whether unpatched nodes contributed to the second cascade.
Version 1.72 introduced "Address Balances," shifting from the chain's UTXO-style accounting to a single canonical balance per token type. It also added "Gasless Stablecoin Transfers," enabling supported assets to be sent peer-to-peer, including via batched programmable transaction blocks, without gas fees or a gas token requirement. The features were designed to improve UX for retail applications and broader DeFi integrations, but the outages have shifted attention from feature delivery to rollout discipline and test coverage.
Sui has faced reliability problems before. A January incident left the chain offline for about six hours, and Friday's event is the third significant outage this year. Often positioned as a high-throughput rival to Solana, Sui is now confronting similar operational vulnerabilities. The repeated downtime is likely to draw scrutiny from institutional integrators who expect uptime closer to traditional financial rails.
Market performance has reflected the uncertainty. SUI ranks among the five worst performers in the top-100 over the past week, down about 20% and more than 83% below its January 2025 all-time high of $5.35. Trading volume across major exchanges remained elevated as the second outage hit, pointing to active risk repositioning rather than passive holding. Derivatives indicators suggest short exposure is building as traders brace for further protocol turbulence.
SUI was last near $0.9067 with downside momentum intact. RSI stands at 36.36, in the lower-neutral range and nearing, but not confirming, oversold territory. MACD remains bearish. Key support sits at $0.8868, with additional levels at $0.8197 and a longer-term floor at $0.6558. Resistance begins at $0.9262, followed by $0.9671 and the psychological $1.0499 zone. A sustained move back above $0.9262 on rising volume could trigger a relief rebound, while a close below $0.8868 would undermine that case and expose lower supports.
