Mali Experiences Prolonged BGP Control Plane Disruption

Mali experienced a significant and prolonged disruption to its Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) control plane visibility, beginning on July 30 and lasting for over seven days. The disruption, which concluded around 00:30 UTC on August 7, resulted in a severity score of 11,699 for the affected BGP signal.

Technical Details

The disruption was characterized by a sustained drop in the BGP median signal, which measures the visibility of a country’s IP prefixes in the global routing table. The signal remained at a constant low level of 347 visible prefixes throughout the event, representing a complete loss of dynamic routing updates from the country’s networks. Other connectivity metrics, including active probing (ping-slash24) and traffic volume (gtr-norm), showed less severe but concurrent degradation during the observation period. The ping-slash24 signal, measuring ICMP reachability across IPv4 address blocks, saw a 4% drop from its peak, while the normalized traffic volume signal recorded a 34% decline.

The cause has not been publicly attributed.

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