Seven internet cables were cut at once — Bitcoin barely noticed, but researchers found a real chokepoint
The post Seven internet cables were cut at once — Bitcoin barely noticed, but researchers found a real chokepoint appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.
When seabed disturbances off Côte d’Ivoire severed seven submarine cables in March 2024, the regional internet impact earned an IODA severity score above 11,000. For Bitcoin, the global effect was negligible. The affected region hosted roughly five nodes, about 0.03% of the network, and the impact fell within normal fluctuations at -2.5%. No price movement followed. No consensus disruption materialized. A new Cambridge study, covering 11 years of Bitcoin network data and 68 verified cable fault events, finds that submarine cable failures have historically caused minimal network disruption. Coordinated pressure on a handful of hosting networks, by contrast, could disrupt visible nodes an order of magnitude more effectively than random infrastructure failures. Targeted attacks on top hosting networks reach Bitcoin’s fragmentation threshold at just 5% capacity removal versus 72-92% for random cables. The twist: China’s mining crackdown and the adoption of global censorship-resistant infrastructure may have inadvertently pushed Bitcoin toward a more robust topology. Tor, long understood as a privacy tool, now functions as a structural resilience layer. And most Bitcoin nodes run on it. Related Reading Inside Bitcoin’s 24 hour race to survive a global internet blackout Even if World War 3 broke out Bitcoin would endure… but not necessarily as we now know it. Nov 6, 2025 · Liam ‘Akiba’ Wright The empirical record contradicts the fear Researchers Wenbin Wu and Alexander Neumueller from Cambridge assembled a dataset spanning 2014 through 2025: eight million Bitcoin node observations, 658 submarine cables, and 385 cable fault events cross-referenced with outage signatures. Of those 385 reports, 68 matched verifiable disruptions, with 87% of verified cable events causing less than 5% node change. Mean impact was -1.5%, median -0.4%. The correlation between node disruption and Bitcoin price was effectively zero (r = -0.02). Cable faults that dominate regional headlines routinely fail to…
Filed under: News - @ March 8, 2026 6:17 pm