Much of Google’s traffic yesterday appeared to be re-routed through Russia and dropped at China Telecom. The issue raises serious concerns as a possible traffic hijacking incident but later linked to a network misconfiguration by a firm in Nigeria. Reuters reports: “Nigeria’s Main One Cable Co took responsibility on Tuesday for a glitch that temporarily caused some Google global traffic to be misrouted through China, saying it accidentally caused the problem during a network upgrade. ... Main One said in an email that it had caused a 74-minute glitch by misconfiguring a border gateway protocol filter used to route traffic across the internet. That resulted in some Google traffic being sent through Main One partner China Telecom, the West African firm said.”

“This incident further underscores one of the fundamental weaknesses in the fabric of the Internet,” says ThousandEyes’ Ameet Naik. ThousandEyes, a network monitoring firm, was one of the first companies to raise the alarm on Tuesday after noticing traffic to Google was getting dropped at China Telecom. Naik writes: “BGP was designed to be a chain of trust between well-meaning ISPs and universities that blindly believe the information they receive. It hasn’t evolved to reflect the complex commercial and geopolitical relationships that exist between ISPs and nations today. ... Even corporations like Google with massive resources at their disposal are not immune from this sort of BGP leak or malicious hijacks. MainOne took 74 minutes to either notice or be notified of the issue and fix it, and it took about three-quarters of an hour more for services to come back up. Most enterprises who don’t have Google’s reach and resources may not be able to resolve the issue as quickly, which can significantly impact business.”