I posted a detailed document on the TIEBREAK contacts. Here are a few things that I noticed after the I wrote the article.

1. Scale down the penalty stiffness down to 0.1 if you see instability.
2. It is important to have the two surface to be “just in contact” and not “too far” or “penetrating”.
3. Do not have the parts in TIEBREAK in any other contact if possible to avoid duplicate contact treatment.
4. If you still see instability, remove the TIEBREAK and see if the regular a3 contact works.
5. Also, just for verification, a quick Eigenvalue extraction will ensure the right nodes are tied to right master segments.