Angola experienced a significant, multi-day degradation in internet connectivity beginning on August 14. The disruption, which lasted for approximately two and a half days, was most pronounced in a key network backscatter measurement. The cause has not been publicly attributed.
Technical Details
The disruption began at 14:00 UTC on August 14 and persisted until 00:30 UTC on August 17. The event registered a severity score of 318,276, primarily driven by a 57% drop in the Merit Network Telescope (merit-nt) signal. This signal serves as a proxy for aggregate connectivity by measuring unsolicited backscatter traffic across the global internet.
Other network signals showed less severe deviations. The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) control plane, which governs routing announcements, remained stable with no observed prefix withdrawal. Active probing for ICMP reachability across IPv4 /24 prefixes (ping-slash24) showed only a marginal 2% decline. A separate traffic volume forecast model (gtr.sarima) indicated a 10% deviation from the expected baseline.
The disruption remained ongoing at last observation.
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