Why does a stale price feed freeze my protocol when no one even attacked it?

DeFi protocols depend on oracle feeds that can go stale, not through manipulation, but simply because the feed stops updating. When this happens, protocols either continue trading on bad prices (causing mis-liquidations) or halt entirely (freezing user funds). Every protocol today implements a different hard-coded staleness threshold with no standard fallback or recovery path. There is no shared circuit-breaker primitive that detects staleness, throttles protocol activity proportionally, and resumes cleanly when the primary feed recovers. An August 2026 report documented a live protocol freeze caused purely by oracle staleness with no exploit involved.