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Google Suffered a Brief Outage on Monday Which Pushed Some of Its Traffic Through Russia, China and Nigeria; Company Says It Will Do an Investigation (cnet.com)
Google suffered a brief outage and slowdown Monday, with some of its traffic getting rerouted through networks in Russia, China and Nigeria. From a report: Incorrect routing instructions sent some of the search giant's traffic to Russian network operator TransTelekom, China Telecom (which, as you may recall, has been found of misdirecting internet traffic in recent months) and Nigerian provider MainOne between 1:00 p.m. and 2:23 p.m. PT, according to internet research group ThousandEyes. "This incident at a minimum caused a massive denial of service to G Suite and Google Search," wrote Ameet Naik, ThousandEyes' technical marketing manager, in a blog post. "However, this also put valuable Google traffic in the hands of ISPs in countries with a long history of Internet surveillance. Applications like Gmail and Google Drive don't appear to have been affected, but YouTube users experienced some slowdown. Google noted that the issue was resolved and said it would conduct an internal investigation. Update: Nigeria's Main One Cable Co has taken responsibility for the glitch.
...However, this also put valuable Google traffic in the hands of ISPs in countries with a long history of Internet surveillance...
The subtext here is that the USA does not [*cough*] [*cough*], have government funded agencies doing the same. The other day, some government agency was found to be spying on Americans, even when congress [limited] its ability to.
So the summary should have been phrased this way:
Oh, right, all of your important information could be shunted off to your competitors. But that's not a big deal, right?
Look, I help people set up private servers to keep their data out of "the Cloud" but you can't be wrong about the arguments.
Event IF this were a BGP hijack rather than a misconfiguration error and even IF they had minted Google.com certs trusted by the default root stores, Chrome would have picked up the pinned-certificate fingerprint mismatches and refused to connect. Everything in Google's suite happens over TLS.
Yes, this would cause an outage, which costs time and money, but your information does not wind up in the hands of your competitors.
Make technically valid business arguments - don't spout crazy conspiracy theories.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
This is just another in a long string of reasons to slowly back away from google.
If you think this is a google-only problem, you should have your posting rights taken away immediately. This isn't just happening to Google, it's happening to just about everyone. If your traffic isn't encrypted, then this is a great reason to slowly back away from you.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There is a lesson to be learned in here somewhere, both for you and for grandma.