Displaying items by tag: Border gateway protocol

ANALYSIS A Facebook engineer issued a command to assess the availability of global backbone capacity and this, unintentionally, took down all the connections in the company's backbone, effectively cutting off all its data centres, the company says.

Social media behemoth Facebook has released its first post about how the site and its associated properties Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus Web went down for six hours on Tuesday AEDT – but reading it is of little use.

Web infrastructure and website security company Cloudflare has beaten Facebook to the punch in explaining why the latter suffered a major outage earlier today, with the site disappearing from the Web at about 2.30am AEDT.

The A and AAA domain name system records for Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp have disappeared, leading to the blackout of the three sites from the Internet, in what appears to be a problem caused by a border gateway protocol mistake.

After what seems like an eternity, a security company has dared to mention the unmentionable: the US does have advanced persistent threats or nation-state attack groups which are active.

Either by accident or design, beginning from 8.30am AEDT on 2 April, the biggest Russian Internet service provider Rostelecom advertised routes through the border gateway protocol which belong to big Internet players like Google, Facebook, Akamai, Cloudflare, Hetzner, Digital Ocean and Amazon AWS.

Content delivery services provider Cloudflare has blamed US telco Verizon for a large-scale border gateway protocol leak on Monday night (Australian time) that caused many large sites to be inaccessible.

Australia's biggest telco Telstra took down part of the Internet in the country on Thursday morning due to a stuff-up with the routes it advertised through the border gateway protocol. The company claims a third party was responsible for the error.

Google has been hit by network issues, apparently due to hijacking of the Border Gateway Protocol by attackers, and diverting traffic away from its intended route.

Internet traffic bound for Amazon's Route 53 cloud service was hijacked for two hours on Tuesday, using known weaknesses in the border gateway protocol, which is used for routing traffic around the globe.