Bitcoin can survive 72% of the world's submarine cables being cut, but a targeted attack on five hosting providers could cripple it
A Cambridge study shows Bitcoin is resilient to random cable cuts but vulnerable to targeted attacks on key hosting providers.Summary
A longitudinal study by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, analyzing 11 years of data against 68 submarine cable failures, concludes that Bitcoin's physical infrastructure is highly resilient to random disruptions. Significant node disconnection would require the simultaneous failure of 72% to 92% of global inter-country submarine cables. Real-world events, like the 2024 Côte d'Ivoire incident, caused minimal global impact. However, the study highlights a critical asymmetry: while random failures are survivable, targeted attacks are a credible threat. Targeting cables with high betweenness centrality reduces the failure threshold to 20%, and attacking the top five hosting providers (Hetzner, OVH, Comcast, Amazon, and Google Cloud) could achieve the same impact by removing only 5% of routing capacity. Furthermore, the study found that the increasing adoption of TOR (used by 64% of nodes in 2025) actually enhances resilience, as TOR nodes are often located in countries with robust connectivity, countering initial fears that TOR adoption might hide fragility.
(Source：CoinDesk)