Saudi Arabia experienced a significant disruption to its internet control plane visibility beginning on September 1. The event, which lasted approximately 31 hours, primarily affected the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) signal, indicating a reduction in the number of network routes visible to the global internet.
Technical Details
The disruption was recorded between 17:10 UTC on September 1 and 00:30 UTC on September 3. The event generated a severity score of 47,441, with the BGP median signal being the primary metric affected. BGP provides the control plane visibility for network prefixes, governing how traffic is routed between autonomous systems.
Other internet health signals showed minimal deviation. The ping-slash24 signal, which measures ICMP reachability across IPv4 /24 prefixes, recorded an average of 7,625 reachable blocks with only a 1% drop from its peak. The gtr-norm signal, a forecast deviation from an expected traffic baseline, showed a 22% drop from its peak but remained at an average level of 0.9 during the observation window. The cause has not been publicly attributed.
Connectivity was reported restored by the end of the observation period.
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