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BOSTON – A Nigerian Internet Service Provider said on Tuesday that a misconfiguration during the network upgrade had caused a disruption in Google's key services as traffic was routed to China and Russia.
Prior to MainOne's explanation Tuesday, there was speculation that Monday's 74-minute data hijacking would have been intentional. Disrupted services included Google's G-Suite search, cloud hosting and collaborative business tools.
"Everyone is convinced that nothing bad happened," said Tayo Ashiru, spokesperson for MainOne.
The type of traffic error involved can put offline essential services and facilitate spying and financial theft. They can also be used to block access to information by sending requests for data in black Internet holes. According to experts, China, in particular, has systematically diverted and diverted US Internet traffic.
But the problem can also result from a human error. That's what Ashiru said to have arrived at MainOne, one of West Africa's leading Internet service providers. He added that the engineers mistakenly forwarded to Google Telecom Google service addresses that were supposed to be local. The Chinese company has in turn sent the wrong data to Russian TransTelecom, a major Internet presence. Ashiru said that MainOne still did not understand why China Telecom had acted in this way, as the state-owned company generally did not allow Google's traffic on its network.
The diversion of traffic to China has created a detour with a stalemate, preventing users from accessing the relevant Google services, said Alex Henthorn-Iwane, leader of the intelligence company ThousandEyes networks.
He added that Monday's incident offered another lesson on the vulnerability of the Internet to "unpredictable and destabilizing events." If this could happen to a company with the size and resources available from Google, realize that it could happen to anyone. "
The diversion, known as border gateway protocol hijacking, is built into the Internet, designed for the collaboration of trusted people – not for competition from hostile nation states. Experts say it's repairable, but that would require investments in encrypted routers that the industry has resisted.
ThousandEyes said the hijacking was making Google's search and business collaboration tools difficult to reach and "was putting valuable Google traffic in the hands of Internet service providers in countries with long-standing customer experience. Internet monitoring ".
Most of the network traffic to Google services – 94% by Oct. 27 – is encrypted, which protects it from prying eyes even if it is hijacked. But work was interrupted on services such as G-Suite, whose CEO, Sundar Pichai, said in February that more than 4 million businesses were customers. Together, G-Suite and Google Cloud generate approximately $ 4 billion in revenue each year.
Google has not quantified the disruption except to say in a statement that "access to certain Google services has been affected".
Google said that there was no reason to believe that the hijacking was malicious.
Indeed, the phenomenon has already occurred. Google was briefly touched in 2015 when an Indian supplier stumbled. In perhaps the best-known case, Pakistan Telecom inadvertently hijacked YouTube's global traffic in 2008 for a few hours while it was trying to enforce a national ban. He sent all the YouTube traffic into a virtual ditch in Pakistan.
In two recent cases, this re-routing has affected financial sites. In April 2017, a MasterCard and Visa card were affected, among other sites. Last April, another diversion allowed the theft of cryptocurrency.
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Michael Liedtke, technical writer at AP, contributed from San Francisco.
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