“Solana explorer down” is one of those searches people type in a hurry, usually while a transaction is pending and a page is spinning. The good news: in most cases the Solana network itself is fine. An explorer is a website with its own servers, indexers and RPC provider, and any of those can fail while the chain keeps producing blocks every quarter of a second. Before you panic or resend anything, spend two minutes working out which layer is broken. This page shows you how, lists the status pages worth bookmarking, and tells you which alternatives to open while your usual explorer recovers.
Is the Solana explorer down, or is it your connection?
Start with the simplest test: open the same page on a second explorer. If Solscan is stuck but Solana Explorer or Orb loads the same signature, the problem is limited to one site. If nothing loads anywhere, check your own connection and browser before blaming anyone else.
Browser-side causes are more common than people think. Ad blockers and privacy extensions sometimes block the scripts or API calls an explorer depends on. VPN exit nodes are shared by many users, so an explorer’s rate limiter or Cloudflare check may treat you as a bot. Try a private window with extensions off, then try without the VPN. If the explorer loads, whitelist it in your blocker.
One more easy miss: the cluster selector. Solana Explorer offers Mainnet Beta, Testnet, Devnet and a Custom RPC option, and it remembers your last choice. A mainnet signature searched on devnet returns “not found”, which looks exactly like an outage. Our devnet explorer guide explains how to switch clusters properly.
Four places a Solana explorer can break
Every explorer depends on four layers, and each fails in its own way. Knowing which one broke tells you whether to wait, switch tools or worry.
| Layer | Typical symptom | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Explorer frontend | Blank page, error 5xx, endless spinner | Switch to another explorer |
| Explorer indexer | Old data, missing recent transactions | Check a raw-RPC tool |
| Your or its RPC | Timeouts, “rate limited”, partial data | Retry, change RPC endpoint |
| Solana network | Slot number stops moving everywhere | Check status.solana.com, wait |
The frontend is the website itself. The indexer is the database that powers token holder lists, labels, portfolio values and search, and it can lag minutes or hours behind the chain during heavy load. The RPC layer is the node that answers raw queries such as getTransaction; public endpoints like api.mainnet-beta.solana.com allow about 100 requests per 10 seconds per IP and are explicitly not meant for production traffic. The network is the validator cluster. It is by far the least likely to be the problem, and the easiest to test: if the slot counter on our live network stats page keeps climbing, blocks are being produced.
Status pages worth bookmarking
The official status page is status.solana.com, run for the Solana network. It tracks the Mainnet Beta cluster, the public Mainnet Beta RPC nodes (split into US, EU and Asia), the explorer.solana.com site and solana.com as separate components. That split is handy. A red “Explorer” component with a green “Cluster” component tells you at a glance that only the official explorer is affected.
For Orb, the relevant page is Helius Status, because Orb runs on Helius’s RPC and archival infrastructure. It lists Helius RPC, DAS, Enriched APIs, Webhooks and LaserStream. Many wallets and dApps also use Helius, so an incident there can explain problems well beyond one explorer. We could not find a public status page for Solscan when we checked in September 2026, so for Solscan the second-explorer test is your best signal.
Tip: Status pages are updated by humans and can lag an incident by several minutes. Treat a green page as "no confirmed incident yet", and trust your own test (does the slot number move?) over the badge.
What to do with a pending or missing transaction
A transaction that does not appear on the explorer has either not landed yet, landed but is not indexed, or expired. You can tell which with a few checks, and in most cases you should not resend in a panic.
- Copy the signature from your wallet. Most wallets show a "view on explorer" link or let you copy the 87–88 character signature.
- Check it on two explorers. Paste the signature into our live lookup tool, which queries public RPC directly, and into one other explorer.
- Wait about a minute. A recent blockhash is valid for 150 slots, roughly 40 seconds at the current ~265 ms slot time. Until then the transaction can still land.
- Check your balance, not the history list. If your SOL or token balance changed, the transaction landed and only the explorer's index is behind.
- Resend only after expiry. If the signature is still not found after the blockhash window, it can no longer land, so signing a fresh transaction will not double-spend.
The exception is a transaction built with a durable nonce, which does not expire after 150 slots. If you use a wallet or app that relies on nonces, check its docs before resending. For what the fields on a transaction page mean once it does show up, including “failed” status and fees, see our Solana transaction explorer guide and the official transactions documentation.
Solana explorer alternatives when your usual one is down
The fastest fix for a Solana explorer that is down is to open a different one that uses separate infrastructure. Solscan, Solana Explorer and Orb are run by three different organisations (Etherscan, the Solana Foundation and Helius), so it is rare for all three to fail at once.
- Solana Explorer reads mostly raw RPC data and lets you pick a Custom RPC endpoint, which is useful if the default node is overloaded.
- Solscan is the richest for token holders and CSV export, but it depends on its own indexer, so recent data can lag during spikes.
- Orb by Helius is free, needs no signup, and adds readable explanations. It replaced Helius’s older XRAY explorer, which now redirects to Orb.
- Our lookup tool fetches from public RPC nodes in your browser and rotates to another node if one rate-limits you.
I would skip SolanaFM as a fallback in 2026. Since Jupiter acquired it, it has been largely unmaintained, and in our September 2026 test several of its widgets never finished loading. For full rankings, see the best Solana explorers list.
Check the network yourself with one RPC call
If you are comfortable with a terminal, you can skip every website and ask a node directly. Send a JSON-RPC request for the method getSlot to https://api.mainnet-beta.solana.com, wait a few seconds and send it again. If the second number is higher than the first by roughly four slots per second, the cluster is producing blocks and whatever you are seeing is an explorer or wallet problem. If the request times out, try a second public provider before concluding anything, because the Foundation’s endpoint is rate-limited and sometimes overloaded on its own. Developers who want to automate this kind of health check will find the relevant methods in our Solana explorer API guide.
A short history of Solana outages
Full network halts used to be a real concern, but there has not been one since February 2024. According to Helius’s outage history, the worst period was 2021 and 2022. In September 2021, bots flooding the network during a token launch on Raydium caused a halt of about 17 hours. The most recent full outage was on 6 February 2024, when a bug causing an infinite recompile loop in the JIT cache stopped block production for about five hours until validators coordinated a restart.
Solana Compass reported in August 2026 that mainnet had reached 30 consecutive months without a network-wide outage, with the official status page showing 100% uptime for June, July and August 2026. Since then Firedancer has added a second independent validator client on mainnet (launched 12 December 2025), which reduces the risk of a single client bug halting everyone. None of that stops individual explorers or RPC providers from having bad days, which is exactly why the checks above matter.
Cached pages vs live data: why an explorer can look “down” when it isn’t
Not everything an explorer shows is live. Token names, logos, labels, holder counts and USD prices usually come from caches or third-party APIs that refresh on their own schedule. Raw transaction data, balances and slot numbers come from RPC and are close to real time. So when one part of a page is stale and the rest is fine, it is usually a cache or price feed issue, not an outage.
Our own site works the same way. Review and guide pages like this one are static and load even if every RPC node is struggling. The lookup tool and the stats dashboard are live and depend on public RPC, so if they show dashes, reload once before assuming the network is down. If you want to understand what each section of an explorer page is built from, our beginner guide to Solana explorers breaks it down.
By the Solscanner research deskUpdated · Review methodology