For Two Hours, European Mobile Traffic Was Rerouted Through China

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: For more than two hours on Thursday, June 6, a large chunk of European mobile traffic was rerouted through the infrastructure of China Telecom, China's third-largest telco and internet service provider (ISP). The incident occurred because of a BGP route leak at Swiss data center colocation company Safe Host, which accidentally leaked over 70,000 routes from its internal routing table to the Chinese ISP. But instead of ignoring the BGP leak, like most ISPs, China Telecom re-announced Safe Host's routes as its own, and by doing so, interposed itself as one of the shortest ways to reach Safe Host's network and other nearby European telcos and ISPs. 'But if any other ISP would have caused this incident, it would have likely been ignored,' the reader adds. 'Alas, it was China Telecom, and there's a backstory, as this is the same Chinese ISP that was accused last year in an academic paper of 'hijacking the vital internet backbone of western countries' for intelligence gathering purposes.'

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