Multiprocessor systems play a significant role in big data era. As the probability of presence of processor failures in a multiprocessor system raises with the increase of the system scale, the effect of processor failure is worthy of quantifying. The subsystem reliability of a multiprocessor system is the probability that a fault-free subsystem of certain size still operate with the rise of individual faults. In this work, we employ the probabilistic fault model and the Principle of Inclusion-Exclusion (PIE) to establish the approximation and upper bound on the subsystem reliability of the cactus-based networks through decomposition into $(n-1)$-dimensional subsystems by fixing one position-pair. Numerical simulations show that the upper bound derived in this way is close to the approximation of the accurate subsystem reliability.