Papua New Guinea experienced a significant disruption to its internet routing infrastructure on Wednesday, September 2. The event, which lasted approximately nine hours, primarily affected the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) control plane, a critical system for directing traffic between networks. The disruption began around 15:25 UTC and persisted until 00:30 UTC on September 3.
Technical Details
The event registered a severity score of 684, with the BGP signal showing a sustained anomaly throughout the observation window. The BGP signal measures the visibility of network prefixes in the global routing table, indicating potential issues with how networks announce their reachability to each other.
Concurrently, other measurement signals showed deviations. The gtr-norm signal, which tracks deviations from expected traffic volumes, recorded an 83% drop from its peak. The merit-nt signal, a proxy for aggregate connectivity derived from backscatter measurements, showed a 100% drop from its peak. The ping-slash24 signal, which measures ICMP reachability across IPv4 address blocks, showed a more modest 7% decline in reachability.
The cause has not been publicly attributed.
The disruption remained ongoing at the time of the last observation.
About the Author
