Over 300 Google network prefixes were incorrectly announced by a broadband Internet provider, resulting in traffic intended for Google being routed to its own infrastructure by other network providers around the world.
The routing leak began to spread when Indian ISP Hathway announced the routes to provider Bharti Airtel, which in turn spread the incorrect information to the rest of the world.
The new routes have been adopted by some ISPs, including US carriers Cogent, Level 3, Orange, Singapore Telcom and Pakistan Telecom, Doug Madory, director of Internet Analysis at Dyn, said in a blog post on Thursday.
Therefore, traffic to Google services from various parts of the world will no longer reach its legitimate destination, but rather to Hathway's infrastructure in India.
Dyn is an Internet performance company that provides products to companies to monitor, control, and optimize their online infrastructure. The company's research division investigates issues that affect Internet performance.
The bug is also known as IP or routing hijacking and is not uncommon. However, it can be used to interfere with communication between the client and the host. In this case, however, it appears that there was no malicious intent and the result was that users could no longer connect to Google services.
Madory explains that the incident involved 336 prefixes and that the incorrect routes were accepted by only a part of the Internet for a short period of time (about 15 minutes) on Thursday.
For a short time, Twitter was filled with complaints about services being offline.
The researcher said this was not the first such mistake by Hathway, as the provider was observed to have leaked 134 Google prefixes to Bharti less than 22 hours ago, for one minute.
