Cambridge study finds submarine cable cuts barely affect Bitcoin but cloud hosting chokepoints remain

In March 2024, seabed disturbances off Côte d'Ivoire cut seven submarine cables, driving an IODA severity score above 11,000 while affecting only around five Bitcoin nodes, roughly 0.03% of the network. A Cambridge study spanning 2014–2025 and 68 verified cable fault events reports that most such incidents cause less than 5% node change and show almost no correlation with Bitcoin price. The research concludes that targeted pressure on major hosting networks and autonomous systems could disconnect nodes far more efficiently than random cable failures, even as growing Tor usage significantly raises the network's resilience threshold.