11-Year Study Finds Bitcoin Network Highly Resilient To Submarine Cable Failures

An 11-year academic study examining Bitcoin’s (BTC) exposure to failures in global internet infrastructure has found the cryptocurrency network remains highly resilient even when critical submarine communication cables experience 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 findings indicate 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.

Submarine Cable Failures Pose Limited Risk

Submarine cables carry the vast majority of international internet traffic and are considered critical infrastructure for digital networks.

The study found that despite this dependence, Bitcoin’s distributed architecture makes it highly resistant to disruptions caused by cable faults.

Empirical analysis showed 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.