Elastic optical network (EON) is fast becoming a key solution for designing optical network with better usage of spectrum resources or other objectives of interest to tenant and/or operators. A primary concern of EONs is to protect the network against failures of its elements, because this kind of event can provoke the loss of substantial amount of traffic. In this paper, we propose a new mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulation for protecting the network traffic against multiple link failures. The key idea is to use bandwidth squeezing together with grooming capability to provide few extra traffic for protection and guarantee a minimum bandwidth for each source–destination node pair under multiple failure events. The proposed formulation solves the virtual topology design problem jointly with the grooming, routing, modulation and spectrum allocation (RMSA) tasks. Due to the non-deterministic polynomial time (NP-hard) nature of the proposed MILP formulation, a heuristic strategy (referred to as two-step MILP) for large networks is also proposed. The solutions and performance of the proposed MILP formulation and two-step MILP analyzed through case studies in a small network. In addition, the performance of three large networks is assessed for cases scenarios where connections are under different service-level agreement (SLA). In view of proposed formulation and two-step MILP, it is possible to identify the configurations that ensure better usage of spectrum resources with different kinds of protection against single or multiple link failures.