Google hijack made Japan 'land of no internet' for more than 30 minutes
Japan was knocked offline for over 30 minutes on Friday (25 August) as a result of an error on Google's part which caused a BGM route hijack.
Google's hijack made Japan 'Land of no internet' for more than 30 minutes
The incident has triggered an investigation by The Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry of Japan.
According to BGPMon, "Google accidentally became a transit provider for Jastel by announcing peer prefixes to Verizon. Since Verizon would select this path to Jastel it would have sent traffic for this network towards Google. Not only did this happen for Jastel, but thousands of other networks as well."
AS4713 NTT OCN, the largest service provider in Japan was impacted the most.
BGP is the internet's protocol for distributing routing information between networks. But BGP's shortcoming is that it's up to network administrators to check and filter information in route advertisements.
As BGP Mon notes, BGP leaks are “a great risk to the internet's stability”.
Previous BGP incidents have sent YouTube traffic to Pakistan, blackholed Chinese traffic, made Belarus the default route for more traffic than it could handle, and redirected Level 3's traffic to Malaysia.
Fake traffic recently forced Google to issue refunds to advertisers.