BGP: The Strange Vulnerability Behind Monday’s Google Outage

A handful of Google services briefly went down on Monday afternoon. While the outage was a minor inconvenience for most, some cyber security experts have raised alarms its origins: Security flaws in the border gateway protocol (BGP) that routes traffic to the far-flung regions of the globe, a process which occasionally allows information to flow through countries they typically don’t.

The company said in their statement that the source of the interference was “external to Google” and a spokesperson later clarified that they believe that external source was a bug, as opposed to a hijack.

But ThousandEyes, a network intelligence firm that was one of the first to investigate the outage, said the fact that some of traffic was re-routed to ISPs in China and Russia — two countries not known for their commitment to free and open internet or their abstention from malicious cyber-related activity — is still cause for concern, one that was echoed by the infosec researcher Kevin Beaumont.

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