100% uptime since block 0.
Bitcoin has operated continuously since 3 January 2009. No planned outages. No maintenance windows. No weekends. No holidays. This is not an accident of engineering. It is a consequence of the architecture.
Since the genesis block on 3 January 2009.
No scheduled maintenance. Ever.
No transaction has been reversed by any authority.
Why it never goes down
Bitcoin runs on tens of thousands of independent nodes, each holding a full copy of the ledger, each independently validating every transaction. There is no central server. There is no authoritative data centre. If half the nodes went offline tomorrow, the network would continue operating from the other half. If 99% went offline, the remaining 1% would still process blocks and maintain consensus.
This is the structural reason for the uptime. It is not that Bitcoin has exceptionally good engineering (though it does). It is that there is no single thing to take down.
Compared to other networks
Visa and Mastercard have had multiple multi-hour outages over the last decade. SWIFT and CHAPS are offline on weekends and public holidays. The Fedwire system in the United States is available approximately 22 hours per day, five days a week. Individual banks experience regular scheduled downtime for maintenance.
These are not failures. They are architectural choices. A centralised system must be taken offline periodically to be maintained. A decentralised system has no single point to maintain.
What it means for you
When you hold bitcoin in self-custody, you can transact at any time. Sunday at 3am on Christmas Day. Across a bank holiday. During a banking crisis. During a government shutdown. The network does not care what day it is, what jurisdiction you are in, or what the political situation looks like. It processes blocks on a ten-minute cadence, forever.
For most people, this is a property they will never need to rely on. For people in countries with capital controls, unstable banking systems, or regulatory uncertainty, it is the most important property of all.