Solana narrowly escaped a major network shutdown this week after nearly 29% of its staked tokens went offline due to a routing malfunction at Teraswitch data centers. The outage has heightened industry concerns about the blockchain’s reliance on centralized infrastructure providers.
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AAPLDisruption originates in Miami, spreads globally
The technical disruption began at Teraswitch’s Miami data center, where engineers detected that an incorrect route was being announced. This misconfiguration propagated via a route reflector in Amsterdam, ultimately impacting Teraswitch facilities throughout Europe and Asia. Major cities affected included London, Amsterdam, Dublin, Frankfurt, Singapore, and Tokyo, all of which experienced complete network path failures. Meanwhile, North American data centers were able to maintain normal operations.
Staking service Marinade reported that approximately 90 validators became delinquent during the incident, collectively representing 28.83% of all staked SOL. Although Solana came within about 20 million SOL of reaching the critical 33.34% offline threshold—which would have triggered network paralysis—transaction processing and block production continued uninterrupted.
In decentralized blockchains, finality is the stage where transactions become irreversible. If more than one-third of staked tokens disconnect simultaneously, the blockchain loses its ability to finalize transactions, causing operations to halt for all users.
Mini dictionary: Marinade is a Solana-based liquid staking protocol that allows users to stake SOL and receive a tokenized version in return, making network staking more accessible and flexible.
Teraswitch engineers resolved the root cause in about 10 minutes and full connectivity was restored by 4:16 a.m. UTC. In total, impacted validators lost 333 SOL in staking rewards, though Marinade stated they would compensate operators through their validator bond process.
Centralization and validator concentration concerns surface
Marinade identified stake centralization as the event’s underlying risk factor. According to their analysis, a single network operator—listed as ASN AS20326—held 27.34% of total staked SOL at the outage’s peak, exceeding Solana’s internal safety guideline of 25%. During the incident, 94% of SOL linked to this operator was taken offline.
Additionally, around 14.1 million SOL disappeared from validators hosted by other providers such as Latitude.sh, Limestone, Butterfly Research, and Allnodes. Marinade indicated it was unclear whether these secondary issues were directly linked to the same routing malfunction or separate events.
The staking platform also admitted that it currently faces significant infrastructure concentration challenges. Marinade revealed that just four autonomous system numbers are responsible for two-thirds of its delegated stake. In a candid post-incident review, the Marinade team wrote, “Nobody should be comfortable with that, us included.”
| Network Operator | Peak Staked SOL (%) | Recommended Limit (%) |
|---|---|---|
| ASN AS20326 | 27.34 | 25 |
Solana Foundation responds, defends architecture
Solana Foundation Vice President of Technology Jacob Creech said that the outage demonstrated the resilience of the blockchain’s core design. Out of 699 staked validators, 597 were able to continue voting operations throughout the episode. All disabled validators restored service within 40 minutes of the initial failure.
Because Solana validators are distributed across independent infrastructure providers, the failure of a single provider did not interrupt the network, Creech highlighted on X.
Solana currently secures $4.3 billion in total value locked across decentralized finance protocols. Despite this, the network has experienced a history of outages. For example, a major incident in February 2024 required almost five hours for the entire system to resume normal function.
At publishing time, Solana traded around $75.79.
