Solana Network Narrowly Avoids Freeze, Data Center Routing Failure Causes Nearly 29% of Staked Tokens to Briefly Go Offline

TechFlow News, August 12, according to CoinDesk, the Solana blockchain narrowly avoided a network-wide freeze early Wednesday morning. Staking platform Marinade disclosed that a network routing failure occurred at the Miami node of data center service provider Teraswitch, and quickly spread to data centers in London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Singapore, and Tokyo, causing approximately 29% of the network's staked tokens to go offline, leaving only about 20 million SOL short of the one-third threshold that triggers the network to halt finality.

Approximately 90 validator nodes were affected, losing a total of 333 SOL in rewards. About 10 minutes after the failure occurred, Teraswitch fixed the routing issue, and the network restored normal traffic at 4:16 UTC. Major affected validator nodes (including Helius) were offline for a total of about 33 minutes due to backup systems failing to switch over automatically.