On Thursday morning, August 6, 2026, Bitcoin users waited for the next block for over an hour and a half. The unusually long break immediately sparked jokes about the “end of BTC”. In fact, the network worked exactly as designed.
For exactly 93 minutes and 25 seconds, no new block appeared in the Bitcoin network.
Such a long break looks unusual, because new Bitcoin blocks are created on average every 10 minutes. However, this does not mean that Bitcoin had a crash or that most miners suddenly turned off their devices.
“The end of Bitcoin.” An hour without a block was enough to start memes
For people who have been observing the market for many years, this was nothing new. Any unusual event on the Internet quickly becomes an opportunity for jokes, memes and reminders that the “death of Bitcoin” has already been announced hundreds of times
Why didn’t Bitcoin produce a block for 93 minutes?
Bitcoin does not generate blocks on a fixed schedule. 10 minutes is just an average time calculated based on a large number of blocks. One block may be found a few seconds after the previous one, while another may have to wait an hour or more for another.
Miners around the world perform a huge number of tests, searching for a value that meets the current difficulty requirements of the network. Finding the correct result is random. This process is described using the exponential distribution and the Poisson process.
In practice, this means that the network does not “know” how long it has been waiting for the next block. Even if 60 or 90 minutes have passed since the last block, the chance of finding it the next moment does not increase.
Each subsequent attempt is independent of the previous ones.
How rare are such long breaks?
The probability that the waiting time for a block will exceed 60 minutes is approximately 0.25%.
That’s about one case per 400 blocks. Because over 50,000 are created each year. blocks, interruptions lasting over an hour may occur much more often than most users think.
A break lasting over 93 minutes is much rarer. Its probability is approximately 0.009 percent, or approximately one case in 11,000. blocks.
A statistically similar situation may occur several times a year.
It is unusual, but still completely consistent with the principles of Bitcoin.
What happened to transactions during the break?
The Bitcoin network has not stopped working.
Users could still send transactions and nodes would forward them between each other. Transactions were sent to the mempool, i.e. a queue of operations waiting to be placed in the next block.
A longer break only meant that users had to wait longer for the first confirmation.
Funds did not disappear, transactions were not canceled, and the network did not require any restart or administrator intervention.
After the appearance of block 961 280, production of subsequent blocks continued normally.
Bitcoin works exactly as Satoshi planned
A break lasting more than an hour and a half may seem disturbing to someone who expects a block to appear exactly every 10 minutes.
However, Bitcoin is not a centrally managed payment system. There is no server or operator that launches a new block on a set clock.
Blocks are created as a result of global competition among miners, and the time to find each block is random.
However, the mechanism of changing difficulty means that in the long run the average block time remains close to 10 minutes.
Therefore, Thursday’s outage was not an attack, a failure or a signal of the coming “end of Bitcoin”.
It was simply a rare result of the mathematical process on which the network’s operation was based from the beginning.
The next time we see information that Bitcoin has “stopped working”, it is worth taking a look at the mempool first and reminding ourselves of the Poisson distribution.
FAQ
Did Bitcoin stop working for 93 minutes?
NO. For 93 minutes, no new block was found, but nodes and other network elements operated normally.
Does a long break mean a drop in hashrate?
It doesn’t have to. A single long interruption may be due solely to the random nature of mining.
Were transactions sent during the break safe?
Yes. They were waiting in the mempool to be placed in the next block.
Should blocks be created exactly every 10 minutes?
NO. Ten minutes is average. The actual interval between blocks may be several seconds, several minutes or over an hour.
