Bitcoin Proves Highly Resilient to Global Internet Infrastructure Failures
An 11-year study on Bitcoin's (BTC) resilience to global internet infrastructure failures has found that the cryptocurrency network remains highly resistant to disruptions. The research, conducted by Wenbin Wu and Alexander Neumueller of the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, analyzed Bitcoin's peer-to-peer network between 2014 and 2025 alongside 68 verified submarine cable fault events.
The study found that random failures affecting global internet cables would need to disrupt between 72% and 92% of inter-country network connections before causing significant disconnection across Bitcoin nodes. This suggests that even when internet infrastructure experiences outages, the network continues functioning with minimal disruption.
The researchers modeled the system using a cascade framework to evaluate how failures propagate through interconnected networks. Their results indicate that Bitcoin's underlying architecture prevents most disruptions from spreading widely enough to fragment the network.