Bitcoin Network Can Withstand 72–92% Subsea Cable Failure but Vulnerable to Targeted Attacks on Top Five Hosting Providers

Bitcoin's peer-to-peer network would see large-scale node disconnections only if between 72% and 92% of cross-border subsea cables failed simultaneously, a Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance study cited by CoinDesk shows. Drawing on 11 years of network data, 68 confirmed undersea cable outages and 1,000 Monte Carlo simulations per scenario, researchers found over 87% of real-world failures affected fewer than 5% of nodes and the correlation between cable disruptions and Bitcoin price moves was near zero at 0.02. The study reports a sharp contrast between random failures and targeted actions, concluding attacks on critical hub cables would lower the failure threshold to 20%, while disabling just 5% of routing capacity at the five largest node-hosting providers—Hetzner, OVH, Comcast, Amazon and Google Cloud—would have a similar effect.