Key facts
- Solana's network came close to freezing on Wednesday morning.
- A routing failure at a data center provider impacted nearly 29% of staked tokens.
- The network stops finalizing transactions if more than one-third of staked tokens go offline.
- The incident left Solana within approximately 20 million tokens of a freeze.
- The glitch originated from Teraswitch's Miami facility and spread to data centers in Europe and Asia.
- The issue was resolved within approximately 10 minutes.
Solana's blockchain nearly froze on Wednesday morning when a routing glitch at a major data center provider knocked almost 29% of the network’s staked tokens offline, according to staking platform Marinade. The network stops finalizing transactions if more than a third of the coins staked go offline, a threshold Solana came within approximately 20 million tokens of reaching.
The incident exposed the risk of relying on a single connectivity provider, identified as AS2032, which controlled more than a quarter of all staked tokens. The glitch originated from a bad internet route at Teraswitch’s Miami facility and spread to data centers in Europe and Asia, affecting roughly 90 validators. North America remained online.
Most affected validators, including Helius, stayed offline for the full 33 minutes because their backup systems did not activate. The company fixed the issue in about 10 minutes, and traffic was flowing again by 4:16 a.m. UTC. The network has a history of outages, despite its reputation as a faster and cheaper alternative to Ethereum, with $4.3 billion in assets locked in its DeFi protocols.