Cloudy Thinking

Peter Macaulay writes: “I have been concerned this week with the actions of Pakistan causing worldwide outages to YouTube.

[tease]
It appears the [Pakisani] government directed their network operators to block YouTube. The operators in turn placed a false BGP route to a “This site is down webpage” for YouTubes IP address. Since that link was so few milliseconds away, the bad link propagated quickly through the Internet causing a widespread outage.

Don’t we have safeguards in the Internet [to prevent] false routes? The backbone operators is truly a small club based upon trust for BGP prefixes, but it appears this was broken with one government directive. Is anyone looking at this stuff?

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 28th, 2008 at 8:12 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.