Yes، for ordinary people, communication with the outside world was basically cut off. Maybe some people were able to use bitcoin in normal times, but during the outage and heavy disruption, that was a very different situation. Without stable access to the open internet, VPNs, exchanges, wallet services, or foreign-hosted platforms, using bitcoin in any practical everyday way was extremely difficult for most people. So those stories may be true in general, but during that period they didn’t reflect the reality most of us were living through