Somalia Experiences BGP Control Plane Disruption Lasting Over Nine Hours

Somalia experienced a significant Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) control plane disruption beginning on August 8. The event, which lasted over nine hours, was characterized by a sharp reduction in the visibility of network prefixes from the country’s autonomous systems to the global internet.

Technical Details

The disruption commenced at 15:15 UTC on August 8 and concluded at 00:30 UTC on August 9, lasting approximately 9.3 hours. The primary affected metric was the BGP median signal, which recorded a severity score of 3,682 during the event. The BGP signal measures the control plane visibility of a country’s IP prefixes to the global routing table; a sustained drop indicates that networks were becoming unreachable at the routing level.

Concurrently, other network health indicators showed deviations. The Merit Network Telescope (merit-nt) backscatter measurement, an aggregate proxy for connectivity, recorded an 88% drop from its peak. The normalized Google Traffic Ration (gtr-norm), which compares traffic to a baseline, fell by 58%. Active probing for ICMP reachability across IPv4 /24 prefixes (ping-slash24) showed a more modest 9% reduction in reachability.

The cause has not been publicly attributed.

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