When a cluster outage occurs, it is up to the Solana validators to restart the cluster. The established convention is that the cluster will not start until 80% of stake-weight is online. Stakers may be interested in the details of when their validator or validators started up. The timeliness of starting up directly impacts the duration of the cluster outage. Shorter cluster outages are less distruptive, and potentially less damaging to end-user confidence in the Solana block chain; therefore it is likely that fast restart times by validators contributes to the perceived fidelity of the Solana blockchain.

Keep in mind that validator start-up did not begin until hours after the outage first occurred. Software patches were being prepared and tested and instructions for start-up written so that all validators could start with patched software and in the correct way. In addition, a first restart was attempted but failed due to a bug in the validator software that was corrected and then a second restart occurred, which succeeded. This document is about this successful second restart.

Only stakers can decide whether a particular validator's start-up time demonstrates the appropriate level of attentiveness of the node operator. The following timeline shows the start times in 10 second intervals starting with the first validator to start-up and measuring until the 80% barrier was crossed 3 hours 36 minutes and 15 seconds later, at which point the cluster restarted and Solana was back and healthy again.

Some validators did not start before the 80% threshold was reached. Those validators are listed in order of stake-weight in a second table with reddish background below the timeline.

If a staker has any concerns about the start-up time of their validator, they should contact the validator to ask for an explanation. There may have been good reasons for a very delayed start-up time. Listen to what the validator has to say.

In the table, validators are positioned from left to right in accordance with stake weight. Larger validators will be more to the right. For example, the largest validator by stake-weight, Everstake, started at the 2 hours 33 minute mark and their icon is all the way to the right because they are largest. The first validator to start is at the top of the table at the 00:00:00 mark; the last validator to start is at the bottom at the 03:36:15 mark.

In each row is listed the validators that started in the 10 seconds preceeding the elapsed time counter to the left. Some validators names may be hard to see because there is significant overlap during some time periods. A "find" operation within the page using the validator's name will find the validator. Specific details of how the data was collected are presented below the tables, for those advanced users who want to understand where the data came from.