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Bitcoin’s resilience is frequently discussed, but empirical data on how the network would respond to large-scale internet disruptions has been limited. A new study from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance offers one of the first long-term attempts to measure the risk.
After examining more than a decade of peer-to-peer network data and historical cable outages, researchers concluded that an extraordinary level of infrastructure damage would be required to significantly disrupt Bitcoin connectivity.
NEW: A new 11 year study analyzing Bitcoin’s resilience to submarine cable failures finds the network remains highly robust even when critical internet infrastructure is disrupted.
Using data from 2014 to 2025 and 68 verified cable fault events, researchers found random cable… pic.twitter.com/z4UFJ8huXu
— Bitcoin News (@BitcoinNewsCom) March 14, 2026
The research was conducted by Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance scholars, Wenbin Wu and Alexander Neumueller. Their analysis combined Bitcoin peer-to-peer network observations collected between 2014 and 2025 with 68 verified submarine cable fault events.
Submarine fiber-optic cables carry roughly 99% of international internet traffic. They form the physical backbone that connects continents and data centers.
Even with reliance on global cable infrastructure, the researchers found that the Bitcoin network remains difficult to disconnect at scale.
Using a country-level cascade model, the researchers estimated that between 72% and 92% of all inter-country submarine cables would need to fail simultaneously before more than 10% of Bitcoin nodes disconnect from the network.
Historical cable outages provide a useful comparison.
The study reports that 87% of real cable faults caused less than a 5% decline in reachable Bitcoin nodes. The average impact across all events was around 1.5%.
A real-world stress test occurred in March 2024, when seabed disturbances near Côte d’Ivoire damaged seven to eight submarine cables at once. Regional internet capacity dropped sharply, yet the global Bitcoin network lost only five to seven nodes, roughly 0.03% of the network, according to the research.
The findings reflect Bitcoin’s layered infrastructure rather than reliance on a single communication path.
Wu and Neumueller describe three loosely connected layers supporting the network:
When a cable fails, internet traffic typically reroutes through alternative pathways. That redundancy allows Bitcoin nodes to continue exchanging data even during regional disruptions.
The study also found that privacy-focused routing tools strengthen this resilience.
By 2025, about 64% of reachable Bitcoin nodes were operating through Tor, a network that routes traffic through multiple encrypted relays. Because the Tor relay infrastructure is concentrated in highly connected European countries such as Germany, France, and the Netherlands, cable disruptions rarely isolate the system entirely.
Random failures appear unlikely to fragment the network at scale, but targetted attacks could be more efficient.
The Cambridge analysis shows that deliberate disruptions aimed at critical cable chokepoints could reduce the failure threshold to 5%–20% of key connections.
The study also identified concentration in several hosting providers supporting large portions of Bitcoin’s node infrastructure, including Hetzner, OVHcloud, Comcast, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud.
The findings point to a clear distinction. Natural outages rarely propagate across Bitcoin’s global topology. Coordinated disruptions focused on strategic infrastructure points represent a more realistic stress scenario.
For now, the empirical record suggests that accidental cable failures, even large ones, have had almost no measurable effect on Bitcoin’s network availability.
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