Nigeria’s BGP Visibility Disrupted for Over Eight Hours

Nigeria experienced a significant degradation in internet routing visibility for more than eight hours on August 3-4. The disruption to the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) control plane began around 16:20 UTC and persisted until approximately 00:30 UTC.

Technical Details

The event recorded a severity score of 621, primarily impacting the BGP signal. The BGP signal measures the control plane visibility of network prefixes, indicating how many routes were being advertised to the global internet. During the disruption, the observed number of visible prefixes dropped by approximately 1% from its peak.

Other network signals showed varying levels of impact. The Merit Network Telescope (merit-nt) backscatter measurement, an aggregate connectivity proxy, saw a more pronounced drop of 65% from its peak. The Google Traffic Report (gtr) signal, which measures traffic volume, declined by 21% from its peak, while its normalized version (gtr-norm) dropped by 10%. The ping-slash24 signal, which measures ICMP reachability across IPv4 /24 prefixes, saw a minor 3% reduction in reachable prefixes.

The cause has not been publicly attributed.

The disruption was resolved by 00:30 UTC on August 4.