In this paper, we explore the 2-extraconnectivity of a special class of graphs G(G0,G1;M) proposed by Chen et al. [Y.-C. Chen, J.J.M. Tan, L.-H. Hsu, S.-S. Kao, Super-connectivity and super edge-connectivity for some interconnection networks, Applied Mathematics and Computation 140 (2003) 245–254]. As applications of the results, we obtain that the 2-extraconnectivities of several well-known interconnection networks, such as hypercubes, twisted cubes, crossed cubes, Möbius cubes and locally twisted cubes, are all equal to 3n − 5 when their dimension n is not less than 8. That is, when n 8, at least 3n − 5 vertices must be removed to disconnect any one of these n-dimensional networks provided that the removal of these vertices does not isolate a vertex or an edge. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.