XRP Ledger Recovers Following Brief ‘Network Drift’ Outage

On Feb. 5, Ripple chief technology officer David Schwartz reported that the network is now recovering before adding, “We don’t know exactly what caused the issue yet.”

The XRP Ledger (XRPL) experienced a rare one-hour outage late on Feb 4 when block production stopped at ledger height 93927173.

However, the network recovered on its own without requiring major interventions from validators. According to Schwartz, while consensus was running, validations weren’t being published, “causing the network to drift apart.”

“Very few UNL operators actually made any changes, as far as I can tell, so it’s possible the network spontaneously recovered,” he added.

A Unique Node List (UNL) is a core component of the XRPL consensus mechanism that acts as a trusted validator directory to ensure network integrity and transaction finality.

The network is now recovering. We don’t know exactly what caused the issue yet.

Super-preliminary observation: It looked like consensus was running but validations were not being published, causing the network to drift apart. Validator operators manually intervened to choose a…

— David “JoelKatz” Schwartz (@JoelKatz) February 4, 2025

A Rare Ripple Outage

“Once servers started seeing a few validations from a few sources, they were able to build enough consensus to pull the network over to a coordinated ledger stream after the last ledger the network managed to validate,” explained Schwartz, who added that these were all preliminary findings.

He confirmed that no assets on XRPL were lost, adding, “It just caused ledgers not to be seen as trusted for about an hour.”

The incident occurred during a period of changes for the network as it recently reduced its base reserve requirement from 10 XRP to 1 XRP.

Additionally, the validator structure was modified in 2023 to reduce Ripple’s influence to 2 out of 35 validators.

The network had faced other technical issues in recent months, including a node crash in November 2024 and full history node failures in September requiring emergency patches.

XRP Price Tanks

XRP prices have taken a hit, dumping 10% on the day in a fall to $2.45 following the incident. The cross-border payment token was trading at $2.49 at the time of writing, down 26% from its 2025 high of $3.38 in mid-January.

XRP fell back to $2 following the imposition of Donald Trump’s trade tariffs over the weekend but managed to recover to almost $2.80 on Feb. 4.

Ripple’s native token has performed very well in the recent crypto rally, having gained almost 400% since the same time last year. Nearly all of those gains have come in the past three month,s with the change in guard in American politics promising a brighter future for crypto companies.