Resolution criteria

This market resolves to YES if, at any point before January 1, 2028, 00:00 UTC, a massive global internet disruption occurs meeting at least one of the following verifiable conditions:

1. Global Traffic Collapse: Independent internet observatories—such as Cloudflare Radar, IODA, or NetBlocks—record a sustained decline of ≥20% in aggregate global internet traffic lasting continuously for at least 2 consecutive hours.

2. Infrastructure Correlated Failure: Simultaneous unplanned downtime lasting at least 2 consecutive hours across three or more major global cloud or edge infrastructure providers (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Cloudflare or other global providers of similar size), resulting in verified outages across at least 25 of the top 100 most-visited global websites according to Cloudflare Radar or Similarweb.

3. Core Protocol/BGP/DNS Root Failure: Either:

   • The withdrawal or unreachability of ≥15% of globally active BGP prefixes sustained for at least 2 consecutive hours, as measured by Route Views, RIPE RIS, or Cloudflare Radar; or

   • Two or more major public recursive resolvers (e.g., Google 8.8.8.8, Cloudflare 1.1.1.1, Quad9) officially reporting an aggregate query failure rate or packet loss of ≥30% sustained for at least 2 consecutive hours.

4. Major Chinese Internet Systemic Outage: A disruption largely or entirely localized to mainland China that meets either of the following:

   • A sustained decline of ≥50% in aggregate traffic/connectivity within mainland China lasting continuously for at least 3 consecutive hours, as verified by Cloudflare Radar, IODA, or NetBlocks; or

   • Simultaneous, continuous unplanned downtime lasting at least 2 consecutive hours across at least two major Chinese cloud providers (Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, or Huawei Cloud) resulting in verified unreachability across at least 15 of the top 50 Chinese domains/web properties according to Cloudflare Radar or Similarweb; or

   • The sustained unreachability or withdrawal of ≥40% of China-routed BGP prefixes (AS numbers registered under CNNIC/APNIC) for at least 2 consecutive hours according to RIPE RIS or Route Views.
     

Clarifications & Edge Cases:

• The root cause can be cyberattacks, AI-agent worm propagation, cascading software flaws (e.g., CrowdStrike-style logic bugs), physical undersea cable cuts, or core protocol exploits. Technically something like a massive CME would also cause a YES resolution.

• Country-specific national blackouts (e.g., state-mandated shutdowns or single-nation infrastructure failure) do not qualify unless the 20% global traffic threshold is satisfied.

• If no qualifying event occurs before January 1, 2028, 00:00 UTC, the market resolves to NO.

Background

Frontier AI models have accelerated the asymmetric offense-defense balance in software security. Anthropic formed Project Glasswing after observing that Claude Mythos Preview possessed autonomous zero-day discovery and exploit generation capabilities, uncovering over 10,000 critical vulnerabilities across operating systems, browsers, and foundational software.

Concerns intensified following the proliferation of open-weight models such as Zhipu AI's GLM-5.3, which demonstrated near-frontier automated exploit synthesis with weak or easily bypassed safeguards. When combined with systemic risks—such as exposed cryptographic private keys, ubiquitous runtime exploits (e.g., widespread PHP zero-days), and shared dependencies across centralized cloud providers and CDNs—cheap autonomous agents could conceivably identify and execute zero-day exploit chains en masse faster than human maintainers can triage and deploy patches.

Criteria Revisions and Changelog

I'm not 100% sure about these criteria yet. If you have suggestions for how to make them better, feel free to leave a comment. I might tweak the resolution criteria through October 31, 2026. Criteria modifications will stay in line with the spirit of the market and will be intended to better track whether a "massive internet outage" has occurred. If I make a modification, I will leave a comment and also note the change in this section of the description.

10/21/26: Resolution criteria 2 changed from two providers to three providers, and now includes similarly sized providers to the named ones. "Two or more" added to criteria 3b.

This description was generated by AI, prompted with a few bullet points of what I wanted it to write and what kind of resolution criteria I was looking for.