The Sui blockchain has now gone down three times in less than 48 hours, with the latest outage hitting during an epoch transition on May 29, 2026, at approximately 4:30 PM EDT (around 1:30 AM IST, May 30).
The network’s native token SUI has dropped to $0.9035 at the time of writing, and liquidation data from CoinGlass shows that $1.88 million worth of SUI positions were wiped out in the latest wave.
What happened this time?
According to a post by Sui on X, the mainnet stopped accepting user transactions due to an issue during the epoch change beginning at approximately 1:30 PT. While validators were up and creating system transactions, user transactions were not being processed.
Sui stated that the Core Team is investigating the issue and that updates will be shared as soon as they are available.
In a follow-up post on X, the Sui team confirmed that the mainnet is now back online and transactions are flowing normally. The team explained that the end of the epoch halt was triggered during the rollout of yesterday’s long-term fix.
As validators restarted to deploy the new binary, the randomness initialization that runs at the start of each epoch was unable to complete because it had a higher quorum threshold than Sui consensus. A latent bug in how that failure state is preserved across validator restarts then prevented the network from completing its transition to the next epoch.
Validators have since implemented a fix that addresses both the underlying bug and the affected epoch, and network activity has resumed. Sui has said that a more detailed incident review is forthcoming.
Three stalls in two days: A complete timeline
The trouble started on May 28, 2026, when a crash bug in the gas charging logic introduced in Sui’s version 1.72 software release caused the mainnet to stall for approximately 5 hours and 55 minutes. Block production halted entirely, and no new checkpoints were recorded during that window.
After validators coordinated to apply a patch and more than two-thirds of the stake upgraded, the network came back online on May 29 at around 8:32 PM UTC. No user funds were lost.
But the relief was short-lived. Just hours later, on May 29, a second stall was reported around 12:19 PM UTC (7:58 AM EDT). The Sui status page flagged it as a major outage, with mainnet settlement issues and no new blocks being produced for over an hour.
The team later explained on X that the fix applied the previous day was an interim measure, and the network hit a variant of a known issue. The network resumed at around 11:34 AM EDT.
Then came the third halt. At approximately 4:30 PM EDT on May 29, the network went down again during the epoch change. This time, validators were creating system transactions but were not accepting user transactions. This is the stall reflected in Sui’s latest post on X, which confirmed the network is now back online after the bug was resolved.
As reported, the root cause of these stalls appears to be linked to the gas charging logic changes that were recently applied to enable free stablecoin transactions on the network.
SUI price drops below $0.91
The repeated outages have taken a clear toll on market sentiment. SUI is currently trading at $0.9035 on Binance, down from levels near $0.92 before the third stall. The RSI on the 1-minute chart sits at 38.53, well below the neutral 50 mark, suggesting continued bearish pressure in the short term.
The token has fallen roughly 8% since the first outage on May 28, and it is now down approximately 16% over the past week. The critical $1.00 support level, which held throughout much of 2024, was broken during the outage-driven selloff.
SUI liquidations hit $1.88M
Data from CoinGlass shows that SUI liquidations in the 24-hour window have reached $1.88 million. Long positions accounted for $1.72 million of those liquidations, while short positions made up $158.80K.
Across the broader crypto market, 24-hour liquidations totaled $294.64 million, with 102,353 traders getting liquidated. Long positions accounted for $157.83 million, while short positions saw $136.82 million in liquidations. The largest single liquidation order was a BTC/USDT position on Binance worth $11.98 million.
The lopsided long liquidation on SUI indicates that the majority of leveraged traders were betting on a price recovery, only to be caught off guard by the repeated outages and the resulting selling pressure.
A growing pattern of instability
This latest string of outages marks the third major disruption for Sui in 2026 alone. In January, the network experienced a six-hour consensus divergence event that also required a coordinated validator response. Going further back, a November 2024 outage was tied to congestion control issues.
Despite its advanced architecture, including its object-centric model, parallel execution capabilities, and the Move programming language designed for high throughput and security, Sui continues to face reliability challenges that are reminiscent of the early struggles seen on Solana.
As noted in The Crypto Times’ earlier report, these repeated incidents risk eroding developer and user confidence at a time when Sui is positioning itself for institutional adoption and has recently introduced features like zero-fee stablecoin transfers and privacy-focused transactions.
Sui’s team has promised a detailed incident review in the coming days. For now, the network appears to be back online and operational, but the community will be watching closely for any further disruptions.
This is a developing story and will be updated as more information becomes available.
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