Google Takes Blame For Internet Disruption Across Japan (theregister.co.uk)

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google on Saturday accepted responsibility for the widespread internet disruptions Japan experienced the previous day. The search engine giant apologized for the trouble, saying it was caused by an errant network setting that was corrected within eight minutes of its discovery. Google did not say whether human error or a technical malfunction was to blame. The disrupted services used internet connections provided by NTT Communications Corp. and KDDI Corp., both of which said Friday that the issues were caused by a change in the flow of data traffic. From a report on The Register: The trouble began when Google 'leaked' a big route table to Verizon, the result of which was traffic from Japanese giants like NTT and KDDI was sent to Google on the expectation it would be treated as transit. Since Google doesn't provide transit services, as BGP Mon explains, that traffic either filled a link beyond its capacity, or hit an access control list, and disappeared. The outage in Japan only lasted a couple of hours, but was so severe that Japan Times reports the country's Internal Affairs and Communications ministries want carriers to report on what went wrong.

Comments

Re:How...

[dgatwood]

How did a company that does no provide transit services even manage to send a route table that was accepted for use? Just seems like a very exploitable issue there

Multihoming. I'd imagine Google provides transit service, but only for their own IP blocks. Each Google datacenter almost certainly has multiple Internet connections to the world. As a result, they have multiple netblocks provided by multiple ISPs.

If, through some unlucky DNS accident, a client on ISP A looks up google.com and gets an IP address provided by ISP B, it would take many more hops to reach that server via public Internet routes than by sending traffic to that datacenter's nearest router (on ISP A) and asking that router to forward traffic through the datacenter to the other set of IPs.