Solana Routing Bug Takes Network to Brink of Losing Finality

A near-disaster for Solana was narrowly avoided on Wednesday morning when an unexpected routing bug took the network to within 4.51 percentage points of losing finality.

The issue began with a misconfigured route at hosting provider Teraswitch, which knocked off 28.83% of staked SOL and left twelve sites in London, Amsterdam, Dublin, Frankfurt, Singapore, and Tokyo without a valid route to forward traffic.

Marinade Finance found that the outage was concentrated on a single autonomous system (AS20326), which carries over 118 million SOL, more than a quarter of the network's stake. The Solana Foundation's delegation program caps each AS at 25% of network stake, but AS20326 sits at 27.34%, already above this threshold.

Thanks to swift action by engineers at Teraswitch, service was restored within ten minutes and over 80 million SOL were able to reconnect. However, some validators, including Helius, the second-largest validator on Solana, went offline for the full duration of the outage.