Solana nearly froze as a single routing error took 29% of the network stake offline

The Solana network kept producing blocks on Aug. 12 when an infrastructure failure stopped validators representing nearly 29% of network stake from voting, according to a Solana Foundation account published Sept. 14.Independent monitoring found that the chain remained live, yet its performance deteriorated: more leader slots were skipped, transaction throughput fell sharply, and settlement finality was delayed.The disruption began at Teraswitch, which the Foundation described as Solana’s largest infrastructure provider. A Teraswitch postmortem traced the outage to a stale default route left on a Miami edge router, with Teraswitch's provider traffic fully recovering 33 minutes after the first alarm.Routine transit-provider maintenance activated that route, while transposed values in a routing policy applied a “no-export” instruction toward Europe and Asia-Pacific.In practical terms, the bad route spread across Teraswitch’s network and prevented affected data centers from reaching the Internet through healthy local routers. Twelve sites across Europe and Asia-Pacific lost Internet and inter-site connectivity, including infrastructure hosting Solana validator and RPC nodes.Independent...