TL;DR: Internet traffic to and from major tech companies (Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitch, NTT Communications and Riot Games) were redirected through a Russian provider Wednesday. This appears to have been a deliberate hijack and not an error.
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BGP is a routing and reachability protocol used on internet backbones around the world. It is what allows carriers to find routing information between each other (in simple terms).
2 BGP monitoring services have reported short changes to the routing of key internet giants, and they do not believe this was a mistake.
BGPMon recorded two three-minute hijacks affecting roughly 80 address blocks.
“One of the interesting things about this incident is the prefixes that were affected are all network prefixes for well known and high traffic internet organizations. The other odd thing is that the Origin AS 39523 (DV-LINK-AS) hasn’t been seen announcing any prefixes for many years (with one exception below), so why does it all of sudden appear and announce prefixes for networks such as Google? ”
Qrator Labs recorded a two-hour hijack affecting 40 to 80 address blocks.
Qrator dashboard for the offending AS
As mentioned in the BGPMon release, AS39523 is a Russian organization that has been inactive for years. The last time we saw them, they were involved in another BGP "incident" that involved Google.
Luckily most of the traffic that passes through these providers is encrypted at a level that is believed to be currently unbreakable. The concern is that a state-sponsored attacker could have new decryption algorithms that are not yet publicly known and it does means the traffic "could" have been decrypted (however unlikely it remains a possibility).