Phantom Wallet Faces Service Downtime Following GRASS Airdrop

Phantom Wallet, a popular Solana web3 wallet, suffered a major service disruption as the highly-anticipated airdrop for the Grass token launched on October 28.

The wallet app was down for nearly three hours as thousands of users rushed to claim their Grass tokens. Before this incident, Phantom has reported 12 major backend incidents this year, 7 of which happened on Feb. 1, totaling nearly one and a half hours of downtime.

Surge Crashes Phantom Wallet Systems

The downtime occurred shortly after Grass token was launched. The highly anticipated airdrop caused a surge in claims which overwhelmed Phantom’s systems soon after the airdrop went live.

Within minutes of the launch, Phantom Wallet experienced severe backend issues that prevented users from accessing their accounts or making transactions. Users reported experiencing issues such as incorrect account balances and delayed or failed transactions.

The wallet’s downtime inconvenienced a lot of users who needed immediate access to their funds particularly pertaining to their Grass tokens.

Timely Response

Shortly after the downtime, Phantom on its X page tweeted,

“We’re currently experiencing an uptime incident and some services may be temporarily disrupted.

If you are in urgent need of making a transaction, please ignore simulation errors and try using a dapp.

Thanks for your patience as we work to resolve the issue 🙏”

Phantom’s support team also advised users to ignore simulation errors and encouraged the use of dApps to minimize transaction disruptions.

However, about three hours after the setback, Phantom Wallet revealed that it had resolved the issues and would keep monitoring the situation to prevent further incidents.

The GRASS Network Token Airdrop

The Grass Network is an innovative project on the Solana blockchain, creating a decentralized data infrastructure for AI. The GRASS token airdrop distributed about 100 million tokens—10% of the total supply— to users.

In the first hour after launch, the token experienced considerable price fluctuations. Its price initially dropped 28% to $0.65, although it soon regained 9% to trade at $0.71. The token is now available for trade on several popular exchanges including Bybit and Kucoin.