BGP mishap sends European mobile traffic through China Telecom for 2 hours

Traffic destined for some of Europe’s biggest mobile providers was misdirected in a roundabout path through the Chinese-government-controlled China Telecom on Thursday, in some cases for more than two hours, an Internet-monitoring service reported. China Telecom’s AS4134, which struck a network peering arrangement with Safe Host in 2017, almost immediately echoed those routes rather than dropping them, as proper BGP filtering practices dictate. The result: much of the traffic destined for telecommunications providers using the affected IP addresses passed through China Telecom equipment before either being sent to their final stop or being dropped during long waits caused by the roundabout paths.

Source: arstechnica.com