Our society is becoming more and more dependent on communication networks. Thus, network operators and designers need to properly prepare themselves against large-scale disasters that could take down a significant amount of networking hardware within a large area.

In this work, we consider the vulnerability of a network to disasters, and we propose an efficient method to compute the distribution of a network performance measure, based on a finite set of disaster areas and occurrence probabilities. Compared to other approaches, our approach is more accurate and gives more information about the vulnerability of the network.

Based on our approach, we have implemented a tool to help visualize the vulnerability of a network to disasters.

We give general methods to obtain finite disaster sets from empirical disaster data and showcase these methods on actual earthquake and hurricane datasets.

Our approach is demonstrated by analyzing the vulnerability of a variety of network topologies to large-scale disasters.