On August 12, due to a routing failure at infrastructure provider TeraSwitch, validators accounting for 28.83% of staked $SOL went offline simultaneously. This brought the network close to the 33.34% threshold at which it would have stopped finalizing transactions. This was reported by the Marinade Finance project team.
1/ Solana got 86% of the way to a halt this morning and it barely registered anywhere.
— Marinade 🛡️ (@MarinadeFinance) August 12, 2026
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
The incident affected about 90 validators. The autonomous system TeraSwitch AS20326 accounted for 118.9 million $SOL, or 27.34% of the network's total stake. During the outage, 94% of that amount went offline simultaneously.
The critical level was ultimately not reached. Routing was restored after approximately 33 minutes, and the validators returned to the network. During the downtime, they missed out on about 333 $SOL in rewards.
Outage Highlights a Significant Problem
Marinade called the incident an example of infrastructure concentration risk. The project will review the limitations on distributing validators across autonomous systems, data centers, and backup infrastructure.
The problem existed even before this incident. As of July 22, TeraSwitch served validators with approximately 27.1% of staked Solana tokens. It was followed by UAB Cherry Servers (12.7%) and Latitude.sh (11%).
Some major operators already distribute their infrastructure across multiple providers. In its Q1 report, the Coinbase exchange stated that 13 of its validators operate via TeraSwitch, with another 10 via Latitude.
For each, the company also uses a backup server in a different location. The trading platform's team explained such a setup as necessary to limit the impact of a single provider's failure.
Recall that in November 2022, German hosting provider Hetzner turned off servers with Solana nodes. At that time, its infrastructure supported about 40% of validators with roughly 20% of the total staked coins. The network continued to operate.
In January 2026, the number of active Solana validators dropped to 800 — the lowest level since 2021. At the peak in 2023, there were over 2,500.
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