Cloudflare has released a detailed analysis of a significant Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) anomaly that recently disrupted internet connectivity across Venezuela. The incident, classified as a route leak, originated from the Venezuelan state-owned ISP CANTV.
Essentially, CANTV erroneously announced a massive number of IP prefixes—belonging to major global providers like Cloudflare, Google, and Akamai—to its upstream provider, Interoute. This misconfiguration allowed a smaller network (CANTV) to advertise a path to global internet traffic that it shouldn’t have been handling.
The result was a severe traffic bottleneck and packet loss as data flowed through suboptimal routes. While Cloudflare’s systems mitigated the impact on their own services, the incident highlights the persistent fragility of the internet’s routing system. It serves as a stark reminder of how human error or misconfiguration at a single ISP can ripple outwards, potentially degrading global connectivity.
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