Bitcoin's Resilience in the Face of Submarine Cable Failures Revealed

An extensive 11-year study on Bitcoin's (BTC) exposure to global internet infrastructure failures has revealed the cryptocurrency network's remarkable resilience in the face of 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.

The researchers modeled the system using a cascade framework to evaluate how failures propagate through interconnected networks, discovering that 87% of documented cable failures during the study period resulted in less than 5% impact on Bitcoin nodes. This suggests that even when internet infrastructure experiences outages, the network continues functioning with minimal disruption.