System-Wide Outage Hits Jito, Affecting Solana Meme Coin Trading

Jito, known for Solana liquid staking protocol and running a Solana validator client offering MEV rewards for its stakers, experienced a system-wide outage today, temporarily leaving meme coin trading platforms vulnerable to sandwich attacks and higher slippage risks. As Jito-powered transactions halted, meme coin traders and other Jito-dependent users faced challenges as trading platforms scrambled to adjust.

In a statement earlier, Jito’s team acknowledged the issue, saying, “We are having a system-wide outage right now. The team is all hands on deck fixing it and will follow up here when resolved.” The outage has not led to service interruptions for users trading on decentralized exchanges (DEXs) or projects not using Jito. However, Solana’s median transaction fees have surged, and some users report difficulties in confirming transactions without raising the priority fee. 

Especially for meme coin traders that usually face huge price swings on buys and sells due to low liquidity and high volatility, they rely on paying priority fees and Jito tips to Jito-powered validators and rely on Mev protection to avoid being sandwiched now they have been facing issues either landing their transaction in transactions or getting sandwiched.

Ape Pro Implements Safety Measures Amidst Outage

Ape Pro, a popular meme coin trading terminal on Solana, reported significant disruptions due to Jito’s downtime, stating that all transactions on its platform rely on Jito-powered systems. "Trading on Ape was affected during the past hour," Ape Pro shared in a Twitter post, emphasizing that “100% of our transactions are Jito powered.” While the platform resumed trading by switching to regular RPC transactions, Ape Pro informed users that trades currently lack MEV protection, implementing a temporary slippage cap of 20% to prevent undue loss. Ape Pro assured its community it would revert to Jito transactions once the system is stable, cautioning users to “ape carefully.”

Save Faces Limited Functionality

Save, formerly known as Solend, also experienced some disruptions due to the outage, affecting transactions that rely on Jito for bundling, including those involving tokens like PYUSD, meme coins, WSOL, and accounts with multiple positions. Save’s representative confirmed that while the app remains operational, transactions are more “finicky” without Jito bundles. Addressing user concerns about failed transactions on Solana apps, Save clarified that issues primarily impact users with MEV protection enabled, while those without it have experienced fewer disruptions.

Jito Announces Resolution

Jito Labs has since issued an update confirming that the issue impacting bundle delivery has been identified and resolved. "All systems are fully operational and secure. This issue did not impact network liveness," Jito stated, adding that a detailed technical post-mortem will follow. As operations return to normal, users across the Solana ecosystem are expected to see transaction fees stabilize.