Solana Nears Transaction Finalization Halt Due to Outage

On August 12, an incident involving the infrastructure provider TeraSwitch nearly halted transaction finalization on the Solana network. A routing failure caused validators managing 28.83% of staked SOL to go offline, bringing the network dangerously close to the crucial 33.34% threshold needed for transaction finalization to continue. The Marinade Finance team reported that the incident affected around 90 validators.

1/ Solana got 86% of the way to a halt this morning and it barely registered anywhere.
28.83% of staked SOL went delinquent. Finality stops at 33.34%.
We added up the rewards lost across all 90 affected validators. 333 SOL. pic.twitter.com/EEC2gYwQgz

— Marinade 🛡️ (@MarinadeFinance) August 12, 2026

During the 33-minute outage, 94% of the 118.9 million SOL managed by TeraSwitch was impacted. Ultimately, the network did not cross the critical threshold, allowing validators to reconnect and resume operations, though they incurred a loss of around 333 SOL in rewards.

Concerns Over Infrastructure Dependence

This incident has highlighted the risks associated with reliance on centralized infrastructure. Marinade has announced plans to assess its validator distribution among various autonomous systems and data centers to enhance resilience against such outages.

Historically, TeraSwitch has serviced a significant portion of staked Solana tokens, as it accounted for 27.1% of staked assets as of July 22. Furthermore, major operators like Coinbase are proactively diversifying their infrastructure by using multiple providers and implementing backup servers to reduce vulnerability.

The need for such measures was underscored by a previous incident in November 2022, when a shutdown by hosting provider Hetzner affected about 40% of validators but did not halt the network's operation. As of January 2026, the number of active validators has dropped to 800, the lowest since 2021, from a peak of over 2,500 earlier this year.