Last week, Google services went down for like an hour or so after its IP addresses were routed from normal expected paths to Nigeria, China and Russia.
The issue actually surfaced on Monday afternoon as internet monitoring firms ThousandEyes and BGPmon said some traffic to Alphabet Inc’s Google had been routed through China and Russia, raising concerns that the communications believed to be encrypted had been intentionally hijacked.
Nigeria’s Main One Cable Co took responsibility for this stating that a glitch temporarily caused some Google global traffic to be misrouted through China, saying it accidentally caused the problem during a network upgrade.
The problem started when Main One’s branch in Lagos, Nigeria improperly declared its own system as the correct route to several hundred IP prefixes belonging to Google. China Telecom then accepted the route (also improperly) and declared it worldwide. That in turn was picked up by Russia’s Transtelecom and other large ISP services. Later on, the same Nigerian carrier made a second incorrect IP declaration that sent Google partner Cloudflare’s IP addresses on a similar joyride.
Google later on stated that its services weren’t compromised because almost all of its traffic is encrypted.
