The Infinite Brief

The leak started Monday at 21:13 UTC when MainOne Cable Company, a small ISP in Lagos, Nigeria, suddenly updated tables in the Internet’s global routing system to improperly declare that its autonomous system 37282 was the proper path to reach 212 IP prefixes belonging to Google.

The move by China Telecom, aka AS4809, in turn caused Russia-based Transtelecom, aka AS20485, and other large service providers to also follow the route.

In a statement, Google representatives wrote: “We’re aware that a portion of Internet traffic was affected by incorrect routing of IP addresses, and access to some Google services was impacted. The root cause of the issue was external to Google and there was no compromise of Google services.”