Cloudflare’s technical analysis sheds light on a significant internet disruption observed in Venezuela, attributed to a BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) anomaly. On May 30th, global routing tables experienced a shift when a Venezuelan ISP, Supercable, erroneously announced over 800,000 IPv4 prefixes that it did not actually originate.
This incident, classified as a route leak, saw Supercable accepting routes from its upstream provider (Telefónica) and then re-advertising them to the wider internet via another provider (Cantv). Essentially, the ISP became a massive transit path it wasn’t designed to be, causing significant traffic inefficiencies.
While the root cause appears to be a misconfiguration rather than malicious intent, the event highlights the continued fragility of the internet’s routing infrastructure. Cloudflare notes that while traffic to Venezuela was impacted, global connectivity suffered due to the sheer volume of hijacked prefixes. This serves as a stark reminder of why Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) validation remains critical for securing global routing.
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