Key facts
- Solana's network nearly lost transaction finality, reaching 86% of the 33.34% threshold.
- A routing error at Teraswitch caused 28.83% of staked SOL to go offline.
- 90 validators were affected, leading to 333 SOL in missed rewards.
- Autonomous system AS20326, holding 27.34% of staked SOL, was disproportionately impacted.
- The Solana Foundation's delegation program caps autonomous systems at 25% of network stake.
Solana's blockchain narrowly avoided a complete halt in transaction finality on Wednesday morning, reaching 86% of the threshold required to stop processing transactions. A misconfigured default route at hosting provider Teraswitch caused approximately 28.83% of staked SOL to go offline, impacting 90 validators and leading to 333 SOL in missed rewards. The network stops finalizing blocks at 33.34% of staked SOL delinquency.
Teraswitch explained that a default route from its Miami site, with its metric and communities stripped, was propagated by a route reflector in Amsterdam, leading edge routers in Europe and the Asia-Pacific to prefer it over their local routes. This invalid routing information was then rejected by data center cores, leaving twelve sites in London, Amsterdam, Dublin, Frankfurt, Singapore, and Tokyo without valid forwarding information. North America remained unaffected.
The outage was heavily concentrated on autonomous system AS20326, which holds about 27.34% of all staked SOL, exceeding the Solana Foundation's delegation program cap of 25% per autonomous system. Marinade Finance, a staking protocol that analyzed the event, noted that 94% of the stake within AS20326 went offline simultaneously. Engineers identified and resolved the routing issue within ten minutes, with service restored by 04:16:15 UTC.
Marinade Finance also reported that 59 validators holding 80.2 million SOL waited for routing to reconverge rather than switching to alternatives. While some validators like Laine and Cogent Crypto, run by Sol Strategies, and Lion3d, recovered quickly, the broader exposure extended beyond Teraswitch, with an additional 14.1 million SOL going offline across other providers. Marinade stated it would review its own concentration limits and begin publishing validator failover capabilities.