The infrastructure providers powering today's internet, cloud, and financial systems earned our trust through years of transparency, learning moments, and building in public. Solana has had to earn trust in the same way.
Since launching in 2020, the network has been tested by outages in the early days, unexpected demand, and some of the most intense periods of activity the crypto industry has seen. Each test has taught us something, and each time, the network has come back stronger, earning Solana its place as a resilient, battle-tested network.
The most recent proof point came on August 12, 2026, when a routing failure with Solana's largest infrastructure provider knocked nearly 29% of the network's stake offline. Despite this challenge, blocks kept being produced and transactions continued to land. Users likely never noticed. A full recovery of the infra provider happened in just over 30 minutes.
It doesn’t mean the incident was insignificant, but that the network had enough redundancy to absorb the infrastructure failure without stopping.
When AWS's us-east-1 region failed last October, much of the internet shut down for the better part of a day. But when Solana's largest infrastructure provider experienced a routing failure, the underlying network continued to run: steady, reliable, and resilient.
I believe this resiliency is not an accident. It’s the result of years of being honest about our failures, quick to fix them, and focused always on making Solana the most reliable chain it can be.
Solana is battle-tested, not lucky
Like nearly all critical infrastructure, Solana has been repeatedly, and publicly, tested under stress.
The difference with Solana is how we react. We, and our builders, treat challenging moments as opportunities to make the network stronger. We publish public disclosures and diagnoses, and ship fixes that go beyond patching the immediate problem to prevent the same sort of problem from happening again.
For example, early in the network's life, bot-driven transactions exposed challenges in how validators handled incoming traffic. To improve the transaction ingestion, we increased validator connection capacity and introduced stake-weighted quality of service (SWQoS) to better manage traffic.
A different lesson came from the transaction scheduler, which rewarded sending the same transaction many times. The answer was a ground-up redesign that made duplicates pointless.
Which brings us back to the recent routing failure. Last year, our team saw that TeraSwitch hosted 38% of the network's stake. That concentration represented a risk, so we worked proactively to bring it down under 30%. As a result of this preemptive work, when the August 12 routing failure happened, the network itself continued on. Even DevNet, which lost roughly three-quarters of its stake in the same event, recovered by itself, with no coordinated restart needed. The network was able to self-heal.
In my opinion, this is the prime example of a resilient, decentralized network performing as it is intended. While we cannot always avoid failures, we can design the system so that one component failing doesn't bring everything else down with it. On top of this, all of the features that we’ve implemented along the way from production lessons have made Solana’s resilience what it is today.
Solana uptime: two and a half years at 100%
Institutions think about reliability in nines. Four nines (99.99%) means about 53 minutes of downtime a year. Five nines means about five minutes of downtime.
AWS, the world’s largest cloud provider, gives credits if they drop below four nines (99.99%). And they do drop below that standard—AWS us-east-1 had roughly 15 hours of major disruption over the last two years, or about 99.91%.
GitHub, the critical infrastructure for most of the world's software teams, commits to three nines (99.9%). This means they account for nine hours of downtime each year.
But since February 2024, Solana has run at 100% uptime. All while carrying more daily transactions than all other major blockchains combined, and processing record breaking single-day volumes. Reliability becomes more meaningful as usage increases. A network carrying little activity can look reliable, but a network handling millions of transactions per second, billions of dollars in assets, and real financial activity has to prove it under load.
Solana has done this, giving financial institutions and enterprises the confidence they need to build on the network.
Confidence compounds
Resilience isn't just about surviving the worst days. It’s also about making ambition for the future possible. Because the network has proven itself, Solana engineers can now aggressively focus on pushing new improvements.
Slot times have been cut to 300 ms (with 200ms targeted next). Storage costs (rent) have been reduced by 90%. Larger transactions are now supported that enable larger proofs and better privacy. Alpenglow, which is on track for mainnet release later this year, will bring finality down to 150 ms. And recently, just after the TeraSwitch incident, the network saw its first-ever 5,000 sustained user transactions per second (TPS).
In simpler terms, we have been able to make the network faster, cheaper, and more efficient. Builders can only focus on these kinds of improvements on a network that they can trust.
Community as resilience
Solana’s resilience isn't just in the network. It’s also built into our culture.
Through the years, Solana builders have ignored the ups and downs and the noise, and focused on shipping. They have built—and they continue to build—the rails that $17.5 billion in stablecoins, over $4 billion in real-world assets, and a growing wave of remittances now rely on.
That culture also means continually raising the bar. Earlier this year, Solana Foundation and Asymmetric Research launched STRIDE, a comprehensive security program for Solana DeFi that provides independent security evaluations, public findings, as well as ongoing OPSEC and threat monitoring for qualifying protocols. It’s another example of the ecosystem taking lessons from real-world challenges and turning them into stronger practices for everyone.
Solana is the battle-tested network
A network that has never seen issues is a network that has never been proven.
Solana has been counted out more than once, but despite that, the ecosystem has continued to build and improve.
For our users—builders, founders, traders, and enterprises such as Western Union, Franklin Templeton, MoneyGram, SoFi, BlackRock, and many others—this dedication has resulted in a chain that has proven its commitment and resilience. Solana has become the fastest, most-used, and highest-revenue generating blockchain. We’re on track to be the financial infrastructure for the 5.5 billion users of the internet – powering the Token Supercycle that is underway.
We know the next stress test will come. But when it does, we’ll do what we’ve always done: publish the diagnosis, ship the fix, and keep on building, stronger.
This article by Jacob Creech, VP of Technology, Solana Foundation originally ran in TheStreet.