Nigeria experienced a significant disruption to its internet control plane on August 20-21, 2026, lasting approximately ten hours. The event, which began around 14:30 UTC, primarily impacted the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing system, a core component of global internet connectivity.
Technical Details
The disruption was observed from 14:30 UTC on August 20 to 00:30 UTC on August 21. The BGP signal, which measures the visibility of network prefixes in the global routing table, recorded a severity score of 795. The median number of visible prefixes dropped from a peak of 9,632 to a low of 9,609 during the event.
Other network signals showed varied impacts. The Merit Network Telescope (merit-nt) signal, a proxy for aggregate connectivity, recorded a drop of 39% from its peak value. The normalized traffic (gtr-norm) signal, which measures deviation from an expected baseline, fell by 13% from its peak. The ping-slash24 signal, measuring ICMP reachability across IPv4 address blocks, showed a more modest 3% decline.
The cause has not been publicly attributed.
The disruption was resolved by 00:30 UTC on August 21.
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