I'm an actual space systems engineer. Any illustration you see of a single cable going up from Earth is wrong. Earth orbit is filled with artificial debris, and the rest of space has natural meteoroids. You see those as meteors at night as they hit the atmosphere and burn up.

So any large space structure will get hit by stuff. In fact, both the Space Shuttle and Space Station have taken hits, fortunately not a big one.

But a 60,000 km space elevator will have a lot of exposed area to take hits. At orbit speeds, everything turns to plasma and makes a crater. A big enough crater cuts the cable.

The only way to design something like this that lasts is to have many cable strands, and space out the strands so they can't all be cut at the same time. You can build it in segments with load sharing. Then impact damage (which WILL happen) means replacing one broken segment of one strand, which is a maintenance task.