Solana's network faced a significant disruption on August 12 when a routing issue at Teraswitch temporarily disconnected validators representing 28.83% of staked SOL. The issue, which lasted for 33 minutes, did not stem from Solana's protocol or consensus mechanism but rather from an incorrect default route announced by Teraswitch's Miami site. According to Marinade Finance's analysis, the route lost certain technical attributes during propagation, affecting 12 sites including London, Amsterdam, and Singapore. Teraswitch identified the problem within 10 minutes and restored service at 4:16 UTC.
Incident Details
Marinade estimates that around 90 validators were affected, resulting in a collective loss of 333 SOL in rewards, approximately $25,000 at the time. Solana continued to produce blocks and process transactions, with the threshold for preventing finalization never being reached.
Concentration of Stake
The incident highlighted the concentration of stake behind a common infrastructure, with Teraswitch's ASN AS20326 hosting validators representing 118.9 million SOL, or 27.34% of the total stake. Approximately 94% of this amount became unavailable simultaneously.
Resilience and Redundancy
The incident also showed the limitations of backup systems, with only three out of 74 examined validators successfully switching to alternative infrastructure. Marinade plans to review its concentration limits by ASN, data center, and backup system.
