I will present recent results concerning the study of the global Cauchy problem in relativity, without restrictions on the size of the data but under certain symmetry and topological assumptions. More specifically, I will focus on the issue of the structure of singularities for solutions with toroidal symmetry, in relation to the so-called strong cosmic censorship conjecture. In particular, I shall present several global existence results for the T2-symmetric Einstein equations in areal coordinates.