BGP mishap sends European mobile traffic through China Telecom for 2 hours
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Also, please: "Operators, where are your MANRS?"
What happened here is that a small Swiss provider, Safe Host, accidentally advertised routes it shouldn't have (those routes may also have been AS-padded, as a safeguard to make them less attractive as primary routes). China Telecom mistakenly propagated those routes, and in doing so became the preferred path for a bunch of prefixes.
There appear to have been two mistakes here. China Telecom's was in propagating the Safe Host advertisements, but the crucial mistake happened at Safe Host in Switzerland, by leaking those routes in the first place.
I understand the impulse to want to live on an exciting cyberpunk Internet where major governments are constantly manipulating BGP4 to capture WhatsApp traffic or whatever, but these "mistakes" are almost always just mistakes. It doesn't help that BGP4 itself is a clownfire of mistakes duct-taped together with other mistakes: significant chunks of global Internet routing policy are bound up in regular expressions.
I don't think you do. On the contrary many people have no such impulse and in fact never wanted or expected such scenarios to be a realistic concern.
It's scary. Undo this story and take back your cyber punks, please. Just the possibility it was malicious, snd that's not necessarily an indictment of China alone in the post Snowden era, is reason to seep up BGP improvements.