Since Bitcoin launched on January 3 2009, the network has experienced 99.984% uptime. Indeed, there have only been two incidents in the entire 10+ year history of Bitcoin when the network was down.

On August 15 2010, a hacker created 184.4 billion Bitcoins out of thin air, requiring an emergency fork to get rid of the counterfeit Bitcoins, and to prevent such a hack from ever occurring again. This was called the Value Overflow Incident, and resulted in 8 hours and 27 minutes of network downtime.

The second incident occurred in March 2013. A block with a larger number of inputs than previously seen was mined, and Bitcoin nodes that were running version 0.8 were able to handle this, but some nodes with versions before 0.8 rejected this block. This caused an accidental blockchain split, the only such blockchain split in Bitcoin’s history. The problem was quickly corrected but resulted in 6 hours and 20 minutes of downtime.

Thus, in Bitcoin’s 10-year history, there has been a total of 14 hours and 47 minutes of downtime spread across only two separate incidents. Now the Bitcoin network’s uptime percentage is steadily increasing, since it has been over five years since the last incident, and perhaps it will soon reach 99.99%.

BitcoinNews.com is committed to unbiased news and upholding journalistic codes of ethics. For more information please read our Editorial Policy here.