Ethiopia Experiences Brief BGP Disruption, Connectivity Impact Limited

Ethiopia registered a brief but notable disruption to its internet routing infrastructure on July 13, 2026. The event, centered on the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), lasted approximately one hour and twenty-five minutes, starting at 13:20 UTC.

Technical Details

The disruption recorded a severity score of 468, primarily driven by a degradation in the BGP signal. The BGP median signal, which measures control plane visibility for network prefixes, showed a 6% drop from its peak during the observation window. Concurrently, a 73% drop was observed in the normalized Google Traffic Ration (gtr-norm) signal, which tracks deviations from expected traffic volumes. The Merit Network Telescope (merit-nt) signal, a proxy for aggregate connectivity, recorded a 50% drop. In contrast, active probing for IPv4 reachability (ping-slash24) showed a more modest 9% decline.

The cause has not been publicly attributed.

Network conditions were reported as restored by 14:45 UTC.