You’re talking about Border Gateway Protocol, BGP, route hijacking and it’s occasionally been a real headache over the years. Advertising routes used to be a more manual process so typos and incorrect entries, like what you’re talking about, we’re reasonably common. It was, and still can be, done maliciously too.
Comment on Facebook and Instagram are currently down.
neatchee@lemmy.world 6 months agoSometimes redundancy doesn’t help when it comes to network traffic routing. That system is based heavily on trust and an incorrect route being published can cause recursive loops and such that get propagated very quickly to everyone.
There was a case like this a few years back where a bad route got published by a small ISP, claiming they could handle traffic to a certain set of destinations, but then immediately trying to send that traffic back out again (because they couldn’t actually route to that destination), which bounced right back to them because of the bad route. It was propagated based on implicit trust and took down huge chunks of the Internet for a while
Buelldozer@lemmy.today 6 months ago
neatchee@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Yup! BGP is an absolute mess and it is kind of a disgrace that it’s still the lynchpin of the internet
Atelopus-zeteki@kbin.run 6 months ago
So could this be done maliciously? I'm just wondering about the Super Tuesday timing.
Buelldozer@lemmy.today 6 months ago
Yes, BGP Route Hijacking can be done maliciously although things like BGPSec can make it harder to pull off.
merc@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
It affected the full 8 billion people in the world, not just the few hundred million on the US.
neatchee@lemmy.world 6 months ago
So? Who cares, as long as it impacts the ability of poll watchers and legal support to communicate about illegal manipulation?
merc@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
The point is, not everything is about the US.