Somalia experiences brief BGP control plane disruption

Somalia experienced a brief disruption to its internet routing infrastructure on August 5, 2026. The event, centered on the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) control plane, lasted approximately one hour and twenty minutes, beginning at 22:35 UTC and concluding by 23:55 UTC.

Technical Details

The disruption registered a severity score of 122, with the primary impact observed on the BGP signal. This signal measures the stability and visibility of routing announcements in the internet’s control plane. The median number of visible BGP routes dropped by approximately 2% during the event.

Concurrently, a significant drop of 88% was recorded on the Merit Network Telescope (merit-nt) signal, which serves as a proxy for aggregate internet connectivity by measuring backscatter traffic. The Google Traffic Report (gtr-norm) signal, indicating normalized traffic volume, also showed a 48% reduction from its peak. ICMP reachability measurements across IPv4 /24 prefixes (ping-slash24) recorded a 7% decline.

Reported Cause

The cause of the disruption has not been publicly attributed.

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