Cloudflare has released a detailed post-mortem on a significant BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) anomaly that recently impacted internet traffic in Venezuela. The incident, observed on May 30th, was caused by a misconfiguration at Telefónica Venezuela, which resulted in a substantial route leak.
Instead of remaining local, Telefónica’s routes were broadcast to the global internet via Telefónica Spain (TDE). Consequently, traffic destined for Venezuelan IP addresses—including those of Cloudflare’s Caracas data center—was inadvertently routed through Europe. This caused severe latency and connectivity issues for local users.
Cloudflare utilized its ATLAS network to visualize the event, highlighting how a single error can ripple through the internet’s backbone. While the routes were withdrawn shortly after, this event serves as a stark reminder of the internet’s fragility and the persistent risks associated with BGP’s inherent trust model, which lacks mechanisms to verify route authorization by default.
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