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Last Friday, 25 August, a routing incident caused large-scale internet disruption. It hit Japanese users the hardest, slowing or blocking access to websites and online services for dozens of Japanese companies.
What happened is that Google accidentally leaked BGP prefixes it learned from peering relationships, essentially becoming a transit provider instead of simply exchanging traffic between two networks and their customers. This also exposed some internal traffic engineering that caused many of these prefixes to get de-aggregated and therefore raised their probability of getting accepted elsewhere.
The incident technically lasted less than ten minutes, but spread quickly around the Internet and caused some damage. Connectivity was restored, but persistently slow connection speeds affected industries like finance, transportation, and online gaming for several hours. Google apologized for the trouble, saying it was caused by an errant network setting that was corrected within eight minutes of its discovery.
This incident showed, again, how fragile the global routing system still is against configuration mistakes, to say nothing about malicious attacks.
What it also showed is a lack of defense – the incident propagated seemingly without any attempt from other networks to stop it.
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