Zimbabwe experiences brief BGP routing disruption

Zimbabwe’s internet connectivity was briefly disrupted on August 8, 2026, due to a routing control plane issue. The event lasted approximately 50 minutes, starting at 15:40 UTC and ending by 16:30 UTC.

Technical Details

The disruption primarily affected the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), which governs how networks announce and exchange routing information. The BGP signal recorded a severity score of 61, with a peak drop magnitude of 3% from normal levels. This indicates a reduction in the visibility of network prefixes across the global routing table.

Other measurement signals showed less pronounced deviations. The ping-slash24 signal, which measures ICMP reachability across IPv4 address blocks, recorded a 9% drop from its peak. The gtr-norm and merit-nt signals, which serve as proxies for aggregate traffic and connectivity, showed larger percentage drops but from a lower baseline of activity. The cause has not been publicly attributed.

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