Recent events surrounding the Sui blockchain highlighted the vulnerabilities of decentralized platforms. Traders betting on a price recovery were significantly impacted when the network experienced its third outage within a 48-hour window. Data collected from CoinGlass indicated that long positions accounted for $1.72 million of the total $1.88 million in liquidations during this period of disruption.
The Impact on SUI’s Price
The price of SUI dropped to $0.9035 on Binance following the latest outage, marking a decline of approximately 8% since issues first arose on May 28. The critical support level of $1.00, which had maintained stability for much of 2024, was breached during the selloff, pushing the token down about 16% in just one week.
The third outage occurred during an epoch transition on May 29 at approximately 4:30 PM EDT. Although validators were operational, user transactions were halted.
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. The Sui Core Team is investigating, and updates will be shared…
— Sui (@SuiNetwork) May 29, 2026
Upon investigation, the Sui team identified a latent bug responsible for the outage, tied to how certain failure states are preserved during validator restarts. This issue impeded the network’s transition to the next epoch. A fix was deployed addressing both the bug and the affected epoch shortly thereafter.
Is this for real $SUI? After 2 major outages and almost 10 hours of downtime, SUI faced a partial outage.
— Fabio (@Zero2HeroZombie) May 29, 2026
Chronology of the Three Outages
The issues with the Sui network became evident on May 28, when a bug related to gas charging logic—introduced in software version 1.72—caused the mainnet to cease operations for approximately five hours and 55 minutes.
Sui mainnet is back online and transactions are flowing normally. The end of epoch halt was triggered during the rollout of yesterday’s long-term fix…
— Sui (@SuiNetwork) May 30, 2026
No new checkpoints were recorded during the outage. After over two-thirds of the validator stake had upgraded to a patched version, services resumed on May 29 around 8:32 PM UTC. Fortunately, no user funds were lost during this period.
However, relief was short-lived. A second outage was reported later that day at around 12:19 PM UTC, escalated to a major outage as flagged by the status page.
The Sui team admitted that the interim fix had not resolved all underlying issues, resulting in a similar disruption. Service was briefly restored at approximately 11:34 AM EDT before the final outage occurred that afternoon. It has been suggested that the root cause of all three outages relates back to changes implemented in the gas charging logic for supporting zero-fee stablecoin transfers within the network.
A Pattern of Disturbances
Notably, this latest occurrence marks the third significant disruption for Sui in just 2026. Previously, an event in January involved a six-hour consensus divergence, and another outage related to congestion occurred in November 2024. The Sui team has indicated that a comprehensive review of these incidents will follow.
Featured image courtesy of Driver Easy, chart data from TradingView.
