Filter your BGP!

Australia had a fairly major nation wide Internet outage this week.

Telstra (Australia's biggest ISP) received the full route table from a 3rd tier ISP named Dodo.
For some reason Telstra decided 'the internet' was now reachable through Dodo and they advertised this to their peers.
**** hit the fan when this happened....

For whatever reason Telstra didn't filter routes from Dodo, even if Dodo advertised the full table to Telstra (which they probably shouldn't have) Telstra should have had some form of prefix filtering or max prefix filtering also or as-path filtering.

Anyway about 3 million people were down for almost an hour. Pretty significant news here in Aus....
They are blaming a hardware failure. If by hardware they mean 'poorly configured BGP' then they are correct

Some links:

Dodo blamed for national Telstra outage - Voice & Data - Technology - News - CRN Australia
Dodo chief says Telstra to blame for major internet outage
iTWire - Dodo explains national Telstra outage

So, take care of your BGP!

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Comments

Roguetadhg

"Hardware issue" sounds like someone Fudged a configuration. I would think that the backbone routers have redundancy for things.

I'll blame the cleaning guy that'll unplug everything at their discretion :P Paul's a good guy, but I'll still blame him.

MrBrian

Yea a BGP misconfiguration is much more believable. I lol'd at how the article from the second link starts out:

"Hundreds of thousands of internet users were left without access to the web for about 40 minutes yesterday after a hardware fault spread through telecommunications infrastructure across the country."

Yes, the hardware fault just kept going and going from AS to AS. I'm trying to imagine that lol

Turgon

rakem wrote: »

Australia had a fairly major nation wide Internet outage this week.

Telstra (Australia's biggest ISP) received the full route table from a 3rd tier ISP named Dodo.
For some reason Telstra decided 'the internet' was now reachable through Dodo and they advertised this to their peers.
**** hit the fan when this happened....

For whatever reason Telstra didn't filter routes from Dodo, even if Dodo advertised the full table to Telstra (which they probably shouldn't have) Telstra should have had some form of prefix filtering or max prefix filtering also or as-path filtering.

Anyway about 3 million people were down for almost an hour. Pretty significant news here in Aus....
They are blaming a hardware failure. If by hardware they mean 'poorly configured BGP' then they are correct

Some links:

Dodo blamed for national Telstra outage - Voice & Data - Technology - News - CRN Australia
Dodo chief says Telstra to blame for major internet outage
iTWire - Dodo explains national Telstra outage

So, take care of your BGP!

BGP is serious stuff. Please know what you are doing. Routing policies are commercial with penalties attached.