Solana's network faced a near freeze due to a routing error, affecting nearly 29% of staked tokens, with validators losing rewards.
A potential freeze of the Solana blockchain was narrowly avoided on Wednesday due to a routing malfunction at a key data center, which caused around 29% of the network's staked tokens to go offline, as reported by Marinade Finance.
The Solana network requires over a third of staked tokens to be online to finalize transactions, and Marinade pointed out that it was perilously close to this limit, with around 20 million tokens at risk. Approximately 90 validators were affected, losing a total of 333 SOL in rewards, a minor loss that will be covered through validator bonds.
Marinade cautioned that had the offline tokens exceeded the one-third threshold, transactions would have stalled for SOL holders. They referenced a previous incident in February 2024, which took about five hours to resolve.
Solana, which has $4.3 billion in assets locked in DeFi protocols, is recognized for its fast and cost-effective transactions compared to Ethereum, though it has faced repeated outages.
The problem stemmed from an internet routing error from Teraswitch's Miami facility, disrupting validators in European and Asian cities like London, Amsterdam, and Tokyo, while those in North America were unaffected. The issue was rectified in around 10 minutes, with normal operations restored by 4:16 a.m. UTC.
One significant operator, AS2032, controlled over a quarter of the staked tokens, exceeding the safety thresholds set by Solana, which all went offline at once. Additionally, other entities faced another loss of 14 million tokens during this incident. Some validators, such as Helius, remained offline for the entire duration of 33 minutes due to their backup systems failing to activate.
This event underscores the potential risks of simultaneous downtime for a significant portion of the network's tokens, which could result in a complete blockchain freeze with no easy fix for SOL holders.
