Core Lightning discloses a persistent gossip-triggered crash
A self-referential channel announcement could crash vulnerable nodes again after restart, making stored network gossip part of the failure mechanism.
Core Lightning publicly disclosed a self-referential channel-announcement denial-of-service issue on October 24, 2026. A malformed relationship in gossip data could crash vulnerable software, and retaining the offending record could cause the crash to recur when the node restarted.
Lightning gossip allows nodes to learn about channels and construct routes. It is information received from a network of peers, not a guarantee that every advertised relationship is well formed. Implementations must validate that information before relying on it internally.
Persistence made this issue more disruptive than an isolated failed message: restarting the process could reload the same problematic state. The disclosure illustrated the need to secure both message processing and the stored data used to rebuild a node's view of the network.
The reported consequence was loss of availability. It did not, by itself, demonstrate a theft, a change to channel ownership or a break in Bitcoin's cryptography.