Incorrect Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) announcements by Vodafone India's network had ripple effects on the global internet over the weekend, with many networks facing downtime as their internet traffic suddenly started getting routed through Vodafone's network, according to reports over the weekend by the Internet Society, Bleeping Computer, and network researcher Anurag Bhatia. The incident, first spotted by Doug Madory, lasted for a few minutes starting from 7:15pm IST on April 17; while Vodafone itself fixed the routes, within minutes, "some announcements were still making the rounds globally," per a post on ISOC's MANRS website. “We have done complete analysis of the reported matter and have not observed any issue in routing security at our end. A wrong advertising of the routing table publishing made by one of our Enterprise customers had led to this incident. This was responded to immediately and rectified," a Vodafone Idea Ltd spokesperson told MediaNama. BGP hijacks are incidents where internet networks, such as those belonging to ISPs, incorrectly announce that they can route requests to another network, such as a content provider. In this particular instance, Vodafone briefly made such announcements for networks such as those belonging to Google, Microsoft, Fastly and several more. One such BGP hijack caused a ban on YouTube in Pakistan in 2008 to leak over to other parts of the world, where access to the website was disrupted because a Pakistani telecom operator incorrectly mapped the route to the website through their networks, which couldn't route requests to a…
