Pyth Network Price Feeds Go Down for Over Five Hours as DeFi Protocols Face Oracle Disruption

Published by

Anjali Belgaumkar

May 22, 2026

Pyth Network reported a significant outage on Thursday affecting its core price feeds and sponsored feeds, with the disruption running for more than five hours. The incident hit Pythnet and Hermes, the infrastructure layers that power Pyth’s real-time price data delivery to DeFi protocols across multiple blockchains.

Pyth confirmed it identified the root cause of the issue and said validators were coordinating a restart aimed at restoring Pyth Core Feeds and Sponsored Feeds by 12:30 PM UTC.

What Was Affected

The outage disrupted two critical components:

Price Feeds: The primary oracle data layer that DeFi protocols use for real-time asset pricing
Sponsored Feeds: Secondary feed infrastructure used by specific protocol integrations

DeFi protocols that rely on Pyth oracle data for trading execution, lending collateral calculations, and liquidation triggers faced potential disruption during the downtime window. Any protocol using Pyth price data for automated operations would have been operating without reliable price references for the duration of the outage.

Bad Timing for the Industry

The Pyth outage comes on the same day that Polymarket, the world’s largest prediction market, suffered an active exploit draining more than $660,000 from its UMA CTF Adapter contract on Polygon. The two incidents occurring simultaneously underscored the fragility of DeFi infrastructure on what became one of the more difficult days for the broader decentralised finance ecosystem.

Pyth said it would continue providing updates as the validator restart progressed. A full incident report is expected once service is fully restored.

What Users Should Know

Protocols integrated with Pyth price feeds should verify that data delivery has fully resumed before executing any price-sensitive operations. The team confirmed the root cause has been identified and that the restart process was underway at the time of the last update.

Pyth’s status page at status.pyth.network is being updated in real time as the situation develops.

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