New data from Blockchair reveals that a hacker exploited a flaw in Dogecoin’s (DOGE) blockchain. This caused a significant crash of most of its nodes.

Earlier this week, a monitoring platform noticed a sharp drop in the number of DOGE nodes. They went from 647 down to just 205. That’s a decline of about 69%!

One representative from the monitoring platform stated, “Our monitoring showed that the vulnerability was exploited, leading to nearly 69% of the Dogecoin network crashing. Blockchair reported the number of public nodes decreased from 647 to just 205 at the time of writing.”

However, there’s some good news. Blockchair also noted that some DOGE nodes have recovered. Currently, there are 331 active nodes worldwide.

In a recent discussion on the social media platform X, Bitcoin sidechain developer Andreas Kohl claimed he was responsible for taking down a large part of the DOGE network. He did this using an old laptop.

He explained, “I used a publicly disclosed vulnerability from BTC developer Tobias Ruck to take down 69% of the Dogecoin network from an old ThinkPad in rural El Salvador.”

Kohl mentioned that most DOGE users didn’t even notice the disruption. “Only nodes that weren’t on the latest version were affected. This was the majority of the network, excluding centralized exchanges and most major custodians. That’s why most Dogecoin users never noticed, as many don’t understand self-custody.”

Interestingly, the news of this exploit had little effect on DOGE's price. At the time of writing, it trades at $0.413, reflecting a 4.7% decrease over the past 24 hours.