Sui’s mainnet stopped producing blocks at around 21:48 UTC+8 on May 28 and did not resume until 04:32 UTC+8 on May 29, leaving the network stalled for 6 hours and 44 minutes. During that window, public tracking showed no new checkpoints or blocks. Transactions could not be finalized. Users were still able to view balances through public RPC access, but they could not move funds.
The cause has now been identified as a crash bug in the gas charging logic introduced in version 1.72. Sui’s core team pushed a fix, and block production resumed only after validators representing more than two-thirds of stake completed the upgrade. The team said a full incident review will be released in the coming days. No forks were reported, and no user funds were lost. Walrus, a storage protocol on Sui, paused activity during the disruption and said funds remained safe.
How the outage unfolded on-chain
SuiScan showed the freeze beginning at 13:48 UTC on May 28, when validators stopped finalizing new transactions. The official status page later flagged a major outage affecting mainnet validators, and the core team posted on X that it was actively working on a solution. Recovery required more than a patch. Validators across the network had to coordinate their upgrades before the chain could move again.
Sui launched its mainnet in May 2023 and was developed by Mysten Labs, a team originally made up of former Meta engineers. Its object-centric design is meant to prevent forks and protect funds during network failures. That part held up in this incident. The stoppage itself did not.
Price and market cap reacted quickly
Market response was immediate. SUI traded near $0.91 during the selloff, roughly 8% below pre-stall levels. CoinMarketCap data cited in the source showed the token at $0.9248, down 7.1% over 24 hours and 16.36% over seven days. Another data point in the same report, dated May 29, 2026, put SUI at $0.9254 with a weekly decline of 16.59%.
Market capitalization fell to about $3.67 billion during peak disruption. Daily trading volume was reported at roughly $725 million, while another figure in the article listed $562 million in 24-hour volume. Bitcoin was also down about 2.06% that day, adding pressure to an already weak market backdrop. The report noted that $1.00, a key support area, broke during the outage-driven decline, while $1.05 to $1.10 is being watched as the resistance zone that would need to be reclaimed.
Third documented outage since 2024
This was not an isolated reliability event. Publicly documented incidents show a 2-hour outage in November 2024 tied to a scheduling bug, followed by a 6-hour consensus divergence outage in January 2026. The latest incident on May 28-29, 2026 extended that record to 6 hours and 44 minutes, making it the longest of the three listed in the source material.
The latest halt preserved the same line Sui has pointed to in previous incidents: no forks and no loss of user funds. Still, three outages in 18 months put network reliability back under scrutiny. The next key document is the full incident review. That report is expected to show how the version 1.72 bug made it into production and whether the chain’s testing and rollout process will change after this event.