14 DAY TRIAL // Over 300 Google network prefixes have been announced incorrectly by a broadband Internet provider causing traffic intended for Google to be redirected to its own infrastructure from other network providers around the globe.
The routing leak started to propagate when Indian ISP Hathway announced the routes to Bharti Airtel transit provider, who in its turn, disseminated the erroneous info to the rest of the world.
Some ISPs around the globe directed Google traffic to India
The new routes were accepted by some ISP, including US carriers Cogent, Level 3, Orange, Singapore Telcom and Pakistan Telecom, says in a blog post on Thursday Doug Madory, director of Internet Analysis at Dyn.
As such, traffic for Google services from different parts of the globe would no longer reach its rightful destination but hit Hathway’s infrastructure in India.
Dyn is an Internet performance company that makes available products for companies for monitoring, controlling and optimizing their online infrastructure. The research division of the company investigates problems that affect the performance of the Internet.
The error is also known as IP or route hijacking, and it is not uncommon. However, it can be used for listening in on traffic between the client and the intended host. In this case, though, it appears that there was no malicious intent and the effect was that users could no longer connect to Google services.
Users complained on Twitter about Google services being down
Madory explains that the incident involved 336 prefixes and that the incorrect routes were accepted by only a portion of the Internet for a brief period of time (some 15 minutes) on Thursday.
Online reports related outages of Google Search, Gmail and other services from the search giant for users in the UK, Netherlands, Iceland, France and India. For a short duration, Twitter was filled with complaints about the services being down.
The researcher said that this was not Hathway’s first mistake of this kind as the provider was observed leaking 134 Google prefixes to Bharti less than 22 hours before, for one minute.