Leveraged traders betting on a price recovery were hit hardest when the Sui blockchain went down for the third time in less than 48 hours. Data from CoinGlass shows that long positions accounted for $1.72 million of the $1.88 million in SUI liquidations recorded during the latest disruption.
The Ripple Effect on Price
SUI fell to $0.9035 on Binance after the third stall, extending a decline that has now reached around 8% since the problems began on May 28. The $1.00 support level – which lasted for much of 2024 – was broken during the sell-off, with the token down around 16% over the past week.
Image: Protos
The third outage occurred during an epoch transition on May 29 around 4:30 p.m. EDT. The validators were up and running and generating system transactions, but user transactions stopped flowing completely.
The Sui mainnet stopped accepting user transactions due to an issue during the epoch change starting at ~1:30am PT. Validators are in place and creating system transactions, but user transactions are currently not accepted. The Sui Core team is investigating and updates will be shared…
— Sui (@SuiNetwork) May 29, 2026
The Sui team later attributed the failure to a latent bug in the way a specific failure state is preserved across validator restarts, which prevented the network from completing its move to the next epoch.
Validators deployed a patch fixing both the bug and the affected epoch, and the network came back online shortly after.
Is this real $SUI?
After 2 major outages and almost 10 hours of downtime, SUI was faced with a partial outage. This is the 3rd outage in 2 days… pic.twitter.com/GLsCqnfrBq
– Fabio (@Zero2HeroZombie) May 29, 2026
How three outages happened
The problems began on May 28 when a bug in the gas charging logic – introduced in version 1.72 of Sui’s software – knocked out the main network for around five hours and 55 minutes.
The Sui mainnet is back online and transactions are occurring as normal.
The end-of-epoch shutdown was triggered during yesterday’s long-term patch deployment. As the validators restarted to deploy the new binary, the random initialization that runs at the start of each epoch failed…
— Sui (@SuiNetwork) May 30, 2026
No new checkpoints were recorded during this window. After more than two-thirds of the validator stake was upgraded to a patched version, the network came back online on May 29 around 8:32 p.m. UTC. No user funds were lost.
The relief was brief. A second stall was reported a few hours later, around 12:19 UTC on May 29, with the status page reporting it as a major outage.
SUI market cap at $3.6 billion. Source: TradingView
The Sui team acknowledged that the interim patch only fixed part of the problem and that the network had experienced a variation of the same underlying problem. Service resumed around 11:34 a.m. EDT before the third and final disruption arrived that same afternoon.
Reports indicate that the root cause of the three outages is related to changes in the gas top-up logic introduced to support fee-free stablecoin transfers on the network.
A model to watch
This is the third significant disruption Sui has faced in 2026 alone. A six-hour consensus divergence event occurred in January and a congestion-related outage occurred in November 2024. The Sui team announced that a detailed review of the incident was forthcoming.
Featured image from Driver Easy, chart from TradingView
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