CoinDesk
Solana came within about 20 million tokens of a full network freeze on Wednesday morning when a routing failure at data center provider Teraswitch knocked nearly 29% of the network's staked SOL offline, staking platform Marinade Finance reported. Finality on Solana halts entirely if more than one-third of staked tokens go dark, putting the chain roughly 333,000 SOL short of the threshold that triggered a five-hour outage in February 2024. Teraswitch fixed the underlying issue within about 10 minutes, with traffic flowing again by 4:16 a.m. UTC, though some validators stayed offline for the full 33 minutes.
Why it matters
The bad internet route originated at Teraswitch's Miami facility and propagated to data centers in London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Singapore and Tokyo, knocking roughly 90 validators offline while North America stayed up. The episode lays bare a structural concentration risk that has nagged Solana since its 2022 outage cycle: a single autonomous system, AS2032, controlled more than a quarter of all staked SOL, above the limit Solana's own design assumes as safe. When that operator's routing broke, almost all of those tokens went dark at once, and backup systems at major validators including Helius never engaged. Other operators lost another 14 million tokens in the same window.
Market impact
The validators caught in the outage forfeited 333 SOL in staking rewards, a sum Marinade says will be covered by validator bonds. The larger exposure sits on top: $4.3 billion in DeFi locked into Solana protocols that would have frozen in place had finality stopped. Solana's reputation for throughput and low fees has consistently come paired with repeated halts, and Wednesday's near-miss keeps the centralization question squarely on the table for institutional allocators weighing the chain against Ethereum and its L2s.
Frequently asked questions
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How close did Solana come to a full network freeze?
About 20 million SOL, roughly 333,000 SOL short of the one-third-of-stake threshold that halts finality entirely on the chain.
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What caused the routing failure?
A bad internet route originating at Teraswitch's Miami facility that propagated to data centers in London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Singapore and Tokyo.
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How long did the outage last?
Teraswitch fixed the underlying issue within about 10 minutes, with traffic flowing again by 4:16 a.m. UTC, though some validators stayed offline for the full 33 minutes.
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Which validators were affected?
Roughly 90 validators were knocked offline, including major operator Helius. Backup systems at most affected validators never engaged during the window.
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What centralization risk does this expose?
A single autonomous system, AS2032, controlled more than a quarter of all staked SOL, above the limit Solana's own design assumes as safe.
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