Syria experiences week-long BGP routing disruption

Syria experienced a significant disruption to its border gateway protocol (BGP) routing visibility for nearly a week. The event began on July 26 at 08:10 UTC and concluded on August 2 at 00:30 UTC, lasting approximately 6.7 days.

Technical Details

The disruption was characterized by a severe degradation in the BGP signal, which measures the control plane visibility of internet routing prefixes. The event registered a severity score of 17,370. The BGP median prefix count remained stable at 4,792 throughout the observation period, indicating no loss of announced routes, but the signal’s overall health metric showed a complete and sustained anomaly.

Concurrently, other network health indicators showed less severe impacts. The ping-slash24 signal, which measures ICMP reachability across IPv4 /24 prefixes, saw a minor 6% drop from its peak. The merit-nt backscatter measurement, an aggregate connectivity proxy, recorded a more significant 63% drop from its peak. The gtr-norm signal, which tracks deviations from an expected traffic baseline, fell 72% from its peak.

The cause has not been publicly attributed.

Connectivity was reported restored at the end of the observation window.