Sui Mainnet Halted Three Times After v1.72 Upgrade Bug

Overview

• The network stopped accepting user transactions three times over 48 hours after the v1.72 release, with the first crashes beginning on Thursday and service restored by Saturday once validators deployed a corrected build.
• The first two halts were caused by a gas-charging edge case tied to the new Address Balances feature that produced negative balances and crashed validators when certain transactions failed.
• The Sui Foundation deployed a temporary fix it had flagged as carrying a low-probability risk, and that decision triggered a second outage when the rare condition occurred.
• A third outage came from a separate randomness/DKG bug where a failure in distributed key generation was not persisted to disk, causing epoch processing to stall until validators purged incorrect consensus state and upgraded software.
• No user funds were reported lost but the pauses froze on-chain positions, pushed SUI down roughly 8–13 percent, liquidated about $1.9–$2.0 million in long positions, and prompted the Foundation to promise stronger upgrade testing and failure containment.