Uganda experiences prolonged BGP control plane disruption

Uganda experienced a significant and prolonged disruption to its internet control plane visibility beginning on July 15. The event, which lasted for approximately four days, primarily affected the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) signal, a key mechanism for routing traffic across the global internet.

Technical Details

The disruption was observed from 22:00 UTC on July 15 until 00:30 UTC on July 20, a duration of 4.1 days. The event recorded a severity score of 83,855. The primary affected metric was the BGP signal, which measures the stability and visibility of routing announcements for the country’s IP address prefixes on the global internet. Concurrently, the Merit Network Telescope (merit-nt) backscatter measurement, an aggregate connectivity proxy, showed a complete 100% drop from its peak during the event. The normalized Google Traffic Ratio (gtr-norm), which measures deviation from expected traffic levels, also recorded a 34% drop from its peak.

The cause has not been publicly attributed.

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