Ripple’s XRP Ledger Restored After Hourlong Technical Glitch

Key Takeaways

• The XRP Ledger (XRPL) recently experienced hours of downtime.
• Ripple CTO David Schwartz said validators manually restarted the network to reach a consensus.
• Schwartz suggested the network may have self-recovered with minimal intervention.

The XRP Ledger, the blockchain underpinning Ripple’s payments network, went offline for several hours on Feb. 5, halting transaction validations. While the system has since been restored, Ripple’s technical team has yet to determine what caused the outage.

The disruption drew criticism from some in the crypto community, questioning XRPL’s resilience and decentralization. Others, including Ripple executives, downplayed the impact, pointing to past disruptions in other blockchain networks.

XRPL Validators Step In, but Did the Network Fix Itself?

In an X post on Feb. 5, Schwartz explained that while the XRPL consensus mechanism remained operational, transaction validations had stopped being published—effectively freezing the network.

To restore functionality, network validators manually selected a common starting point based on the last publicly available ledger data and resumed publishing validations from there.

However, Schwartz cautioned that this fix might not have been necessary, as it appeared the network may have self-recovered.

“Only one validator operator manually intervened,” Schwartz wrote. “It’s still not entirely clear if that solved the problem or if the network self-healed.”

The XRPL serves as the base blockchain for XRP, a token widely used in banking for instant cross-border transactions. Given its role in financial infrastructure, any disruption raises concerns about its reliability.

Skepticism

Blockchain downtime is often met with skepticism in crypto circles, and XRPL’s outage was no exception. Critics took to social media to mock the network’s reliability.

One user noted that despite the ledger being down, mainstream media outlets had largely ignored the incident—not due to censorship, they claimed, but because “no one cares because it has no impact on banks, the economy, or anything of relevance.”

Another user questioned XRPL’s decentralization, suggesting that “if the XRPL was truly decentralized, it wouldn’t have been shut down today at the push of a button.”

Supporters of XRP, however, were quick to push back, drawing comparisons to Bitcoin’s past outages. “Bitcoin has gone down twice in its history, and both times lasted way longer than XRPL’s downtime,” one user argued. “XRP is clearly the better choice.”

The crypto industry has seen its share of network disruptions over the years. Solana, in particular, has experienced repeated outages, often lasting longer than XRPL’s.

At the time of publication, the XRP Ledger was fully operational, though questions remain about the cause of the incident.