What if a BGP routing failure partitions the global internet?
A multi-hour global BGP partition halts payments, exchanges and cloud — the trade is a flight-to-cash and a mechanical risk-off (short high-beta crypto and Nasdaq) that unwinds the moment routing is restored, since nothing is structurally impaired. It rhymes with the Oct-2021 Facebook BGP outage and the Jul-2024 CrowdStrike global IT halt: sharp operational paralysis, near-full recovery within the session. The bank-crisis analogues attached overstate persistence; this is an intraday liquidity air-pocket, best played as a fade.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 0–6 months horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. A cascading routing-protocol failure partitions the internet for hours, halting payments, trading, cloud services and logistics worldwide. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Financial conditions ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.