Telegram-Linked TON Blockchain Suffers Second Outage

The TON blockchain created by messaging app provider Telegram is suffering its second outage in as many days.

“Block production issues began at 19:19 UTC” the team behind the project told users in a message posted to Telegram and X (formerly Twitter) on Wednesday during U.S. afternoon hours. “The disruption appears to be due to heavy load attributed to DOGS token minting. TON Core is working on a solution.”

The team emphasized that users’ assets were not at risk. They followed with an “urgent” post on X asking mainnet validators to update their nodes and restart.

According to the Tonscan block explorer, the last blocks were recorded on the chain at 12:23 Eastern time, or 16:23 UTC.

The price of the blockchain’s TON token didn’t really budge due to this latest outage, falling 0.99% on a four-hour basis and down 4% over 24 hours at the time of writing, according to CoinDesk data.

“As long I can finally withdraw my dogs 😅😅 – I can wait,” one user wrote in a reply to the team’s Telegram message.

The previous outage occurred during Asia trading hours Wednesday and lasted about six hours. It, too, had little lasting effect on the TON price, which had already taken a hit several days earlier when Pavel Durov, Telegram’s founder and CEO, was arrested in France.

That earlier downtime was also partially blamed on the popularity of the DOGS airdrop, part of the Ton Foundation’s effort to raise awareness of what it believes is the unjust arrest of Durov.