Massive route leak causes Internet slowdown
Earlier today a massive route leak initiated by Telekom Malaysia (AS4788) caused significant network problems for the global routing system. Primarily affected was Level3 (AS3549 – formerly known as Global Crossing) and their customers. Below are some of the details as we know them now.
Starting at 08:43 UTC today June 12th, AS4788 Telekom Malaysia started to announce about 179,000 of prefixes to Level3 (AS3549, the Global crossing AS), whom in turn accepted these and propagated them to their peers and customers. Since Telekom Malaysia had inserted itself between these thousands of prefixes and Level3 it was now responsible for delivering these packets to the intended destinations.
This event resulted in significant packet loss and Internet slow down in all parts of the world. The Level3 network in particular suffered from severe service degradation between the Asia pacific region and the rest of their network. The graph below for example shows the packet loss as measured by OpenDNS between London over Level3 and Hong Kong. The same loss patterns were visible from other Level3 locations globally to for example Singapore, Hong Kong and Sydney.
At the same time the round trip time between these Continue reading

