On August 12, a technical incident occurred on the Solana network related to a routing failure at the TeraSwitch infrastructure provider. Due to this problem, validators were disabled at the same time, which accounted for more than twenty-eight percent of all tokens blocked in staking. This figure was dangerously close to the critical threshold of thirty-three percent, at which the network would completely stop finalizing new transactions. The Marinade Finance project team published detailed information about this incident. The technical problem affected about ninety independent validators. The provider's autonomous system accounted for almost one hundred and nineteen million tokens, which accounted for more than twenty-seven percent of the total steak of the entire network. During the failure itself, ninety-four percent of this amount of funds was simultaneously disconnected.

As a result, the critical shutdown level was not reached. After about thirty-three minutes, the specialists successfully restored routing, and all affected validators returned to the network. During the forced downtime, they lost about three hundred and thirty-three coins in the form of standard online rewards. Marinade representatives called the incident a clear example of the risk of excessive concentration of infrastructure. The project plans to review the current restrictions on the distribution of validators across autonomous systems and data centers. A similar problem existed online before this particular incident. Back at the end of July, this provider served validators with twenty-seven percent of the blocked tokens. He was followed by other large hosting companies with shares of twelve and eleven percent.

Some large operators have already distributed their infrastructure among several providers in advance. The Coinbase cryptocurrency exchange previously reported that it uses the services of two different companies for its validators. The company also uses a special backup server in a different geographical location for each node. The trading platform team explained this scheme by the need to limit the consequences of a failure of one provider. In November 2000, another hosting provider was already shutting down servers with Solana nodes. At that time, about forty percent of validators were working on its infrastructure, with a fifth of the total volume of blocked coins. The network then successfully continued its regular operation without serious consequences. In January of this year, the number of active Solana validators decreased to eight hundred, which was the lowest value since 2000.