BG Staff
Even tiny mistakes by world’s biggest companies can have serious consequences. Recently the most popular search engine Google accidentally botched a Border Gateway Protocol which brought half the internet in Japan to a halt. The error occurred was the number of falsely announced peer prefixes that were sent to Verizon.
As soon as the faulty rerouting request went through, numerous internet providers in Japan became disconnected to the web and in some cases experienced slower browsing speeds. Google has owned full responsibility of its mistake and apologized in a statement as:
“Incorrect information for the network was sent by the platform accidentally because of which problems occurred. The correct information was modified within eight minutes. The company apologizes for causing inconvenience and anxiety as a result of the error”.
The reports state that the issue was resolved but the interruption lasted for several hours and the blunder seemed to be so huge that Japan’s Internal Affair and Communications Ministry stated an investigation for finding out the actual cause of the problem. They found out that Google just became a transit provider by mistake for Jastel by announcing peer prefixes to Verizon. As Verizon would select this path to Jastel, it would have sent the traffic for this network towards Google. It happened to thousands of other networks along with Jastel.
It appeared to be a configuration error or a software problem on Google’s network that led to announcing of thousands of prefixes to Verizon. This error caused disturbance to the workflow of the East Japan Railway Company, country’s banks as well as to thousands of gamers such as Switch, Wii U, and 3DS.
Via: The Next Web
