Mali connectivity disruption lasted over five days

Mali experienced a significant, multi-day disruption to its internet connectivity beginning on July 30. The event, which lasted over five days, primarily impacted the control plane visibility of the country’s network prefixes.

Technical Details

The disruption began at approximately 21:25 UTC on July 30 and concluded around 00:30 UTC on August 5, lasting for approximately 5.1 days. The event registered a severity score of 8,417, with the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) signal being the most affected. BGP is the routing protocol that manages how traffic is directed between networks globally; disruptions to it can affect the visibility and reachability of a country’s internet prefixes.

Other network measurements showed concurrent anomalies. The Merit Network Telescope (merit-nt) backscatter signal, a proxy for overall network activity, recorded a drop of 49% from its peak. The normalized Google Traffic (gtr-norm) signal, which measures relative traffic volume, also showed a 35% decline from its peak during the observation period. In contrast, active probing for IPv4 reachability (ping-slash24) and the raw traffic volume (gtr) signals showed less severe deviations.

The cause has not been publicly attributed.

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