A recent outage on the Solana network took 90 validators offline, accounting for 28.83% of staked SOL, due to a routing failure. The incident lasted for approximately 33 minutes, but despite this, transactions continued to finalize as the network maintained consensus.
The outage brought the network close to its 33.34% finality threshold, with only 4.51 percentage points or roughly 19.9 million SOL remaining online. However, the network's ability to survive this outage was due in part to validation services outside the impacted routing group continuing to function as normal.
Network Resilience
The Solana network's resilience was tested as 597 out of 699 validators, or 85%, continued to vote for blocks, preventing the failure from cascading. Geographic and provider diversity limited the outage, while rapid recovery prevented concentrated infrastructure exposure from becoming systemic.
Validators lost around 333 SOL in rewards due to the outage, creating a direct economic cost. The incident highlights the importance of validator hosting diversity and automatic failover as critical safeguards against another routing failure.
Prevention of Future Outages
To prevent similar outages in the future, it is crucial for the Solana network to maintain its diversity and ensure that validators are distributed across many providers and geographies. This will help prevent the failure from cascading and minimize the risk of a network-wide halt.
