Solana reportedly absorbed a traffic surge peaking around 6 terabits per second without disrupting block production, transaction confirmations, or user fees. Unlike past incidents that led to network halts and coordinated restarts, this event passed quietly, with the chain continuing to operate normally under extreme load.

The episode highlights how Solana’s post-2022 upgrades have changed its failure mode. By adopting the QUIC networking protocol, enforcing stake-weighted quality of service, and introducing local fee markets with priority fees, the network can now throttle, rate-limit, and deprioritize spam at the edge before it overwhelms validators. Traffic that is not backed by stake or fees is pushed into a slow lane, while legitimate users continue to get block space.

Rather than trying to eliminate attacks entirely, Solana’s design now assumes constant adversarial pressure and focuses on making abuse expensive and ineffective. The result is a network that stays live during conditions comparable to large-scale internet DDoS events, signaling a shift from fragile high-throughput experimentation toward more mature, attack-resilient infrastructure.