Mobile internet traffic from multiple carriers in Europe took an unintended turn through China Telecom for over two hours on June 6 because of a route leak incident.
Internet traffic uses multiple networks to move across the globe to its destinations. These hops represent an established route through network policies and rules. Autonomous systems, such as an Internet Service Provider (ISP) use the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) to exchange the routing information.
A BGP route leak is
defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as “the propagation of routing announcement(s) beyond their intended scope” and they can result in redirecting the traffic through a path that could allow eavesdropping or analysis.