Solana network remains online despite outage at infrastructure provider

The Solana network weathered an outage last night when an infrastructure provider used by a portion of the validators went down. Despite the issues, the network continued to produce blocks and process transactions, with no visible interruption for users.

Solana is available at OKX and Bybit.

In brief:

• An outage at an infrastructure provider affected 102 of the 699 Solana validators.
• 597 validators continued to vote actively; the affected validators recovered within 40 minutes.
• The Solana network remained operational throughout the entire outage.

What exactly happened

During the night from Wednesday to Thursday, an infrastructure provider used by a portion of the Solana validators went down. Of the 699 staked validators, 102 temporarily stopped voting. The remaining 597, about 85% of the total, continued to operate normally. That is according to Jacob Creech, chief technology officer at the Solana Foundation.

The affected validators were fully operational again within 40 minutes. Validators participating in the Solana Foundation Delegation Program experienced no issues and remained active throughout.

Decentralisation as a safeguard

The fact that the network survived the outage without interruption is due to Solana’s validators being spread across various independent infrastructure providers. Because no single party controls all validators, an outage at one provider does not trigger a chain reaction that brings down the entire network.

This is not the first time Solana has faced infrastructure problems. Previously, the network came dangerously close to a complete network halt due to a similar outage at a hosting provider. The difference now is that the distribution across providers kept the damage limited. Creech sees this as evidence that the network’s infrastructure diversity works as intended.

The Solana price barely reacted to the incident. At the time of writing, SOL stands at $76.22, down 0.2% in the past 24 hours.