Resilience of the Internet to Random Breakdowns

A common property of many large networks, including the Internet, is that the connectivity of the various nodes follows a scale-free power-law distribution, P(k) = ck(-alpha). We study the stability of such networks with respect to crashes, such as random removal of sites. Our approach, based on percolation theory, leads to a general condition for the critical fraction of nodes, p(c), that needs to be removed before the network disintegrates. We show analytically and numerically that for alpha0.99.