Ethiopia Experienced Brief BGP Control Plane Disruption

Ethiopia experienced a brief but notable disruption to its internet control plane on Thursday, August 13, 2026. The event, which lasted approximately 20 minutes, centered on a degradation of Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) visibility.

Technical Details

The disruption occurred between 12:20 and 12:40 UTC. The primary affected signal was BGP, which registered a severity score of 110. The BGP signal measures the control plane visibility of a country’s internet routing prefixes; a drop indicates a reduction in the number of network routes being advertised globally.

Concurrent, less severe degradations were observed in other connectivity metrics. The Merit Network Telescope (merit-nt) signal, a proxy for aggregate connectivity derived from backscatter analysis, recorded a 34% drop from its peak. The Google Traffic Report (gtr) signal, which measures deviations from expected traffic baselines, showed a 12% decline. Active probing for ICMP reachability across IPv4 /24 prefixes (ping-slash24) showed an 8% reduction in reachability.

The cause has not been publicly attributed.

All observed metrics had returned to baseline levels by the end of the reporting window.