The latest bitcoin price crash has started a new debate on the long-term viability of many aspects of the mining industry. On January 12th CEX.io announced it would suspend cloud mining activities due to low prices. In a blog post, the company said cloud mining is simply no longer profitable. The anonymous miner and blockchain data analyst pointed out that GHash.io reported a drop from 34,000 active user accounts to 6,000 user accounts on January 13th. As a result, the estimated number of bitcoin miners plummeted by almost 30,000 in a matter of days. However, this does not mean the hash rate went down. Following the crash, the hash rate recovered and returned to peak levels in less than a week, after hitting a low of 229,513,534 GH/s on 14th January.

http://www.coindesk.com/cloud-mining-suffers-hash-rate-plateaus/