Last Friday, Google disabled internet connectivity in Japan, resulting in customers of the country's largest ISPs being unable to access the internet for several hours.
Specifically, the mishap for Google occurred when the Border Gateway Protocol - also known as BGP - collapsed due to a connection error that led to the announcement of false prefixes which were sent to Verizon. This in turn caused internet providers such as NTT Communications and KDDI Corp. to remain offline for a fairly long period while many customers experienced an extremely slow connection.
Information-wise, the NTT service is used by nearly 7.7 million residential users and 480,000 businesses in Japan. The size of the damage is therefore evident.
Google admitted its mistake and explained that the poor connection was fixed in just 8 minutes. However, the truth is that the outage lasted several hours, starting at 12.22 pm local time on August 25. At 3.50 pm there were still several businesses reporting internet connection problems.
«We provided incorrect information about the network and, as a result, problems occurred. We apologize for any inconvenience and concerns we caused. We made sure to restore the connection as soon as possible.» says a company spokesperson.
It goes without saying that the outage affected several companies and services including Mercari and Line.
Also, the reaction of the Japanese authorities was expected and they were not at all satisfied with the incident, while the Ministry of Interior and Communications has already announced the launch of investigations. The investigations reported that the mistake made with Verizon caused major disruptions in the network.
