South Africa Experienced BGP Control Plane Disruption on August 12

South Africa experienced a disruption to its internet routing control plane on the evening of August 12, 2026. The event lasted approximately two hours, centered around 20:20 UTC, and primarily impacted the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) signal. The cause has not been publicly attributed.

Technical Details

The disruption occurred between 20:20 and 22:15 UTC. The primary affected metric was the BGP control plane, which registered a severity score of 120. BGP is the protocol that manages the exchange of routing information between networks, governing the visibility of internet prefixes.

Other network telemetry showed minor concurrent deviations. The ping-slash24 signal, which measures ICMP reachability across IPv4 network blocks, recorded a nominal 1% drop in reachable prefixes. The gtr-norm signal, a normalized traffic volume indicator, showed a 45% drop from its observed peak during the event window. Backscatter measurements from the ucsd-nt source also indicated a 21% reduction in observed traffic.

Connectivity was reported restored by 22:15 UTC.