At a glance, a look at Internet outages due to route ‘hijackings’
By APSaturday, May 8, 2010
Some examples of Internet ‘hijackings’
Some instances of Internet outages caused by hijacked traffic, as listed by the Department of Homeland Security and other sources:
April 1997: MAI Network Services, an Internet service provider in Virginia, passes bad routing information to Sprint, which relays it, causing widespread outages.
April 1998: An Israeli ISP causes widespread outages.
December 1999: AT&T’s server network is hijacked by another ISP.
May 2000: Sprint addresses hijacked by another ISP.
April 2001: Global Internet carrier Flag Telecom hijacks routes.
December 2004: Turk Telekom, a Turkish ISP, hijacks much of the Internet on Christmas Eve.
September 2005: AT&T, XO and BellSouth traffic is misdirected to Bolivia. The next day, it’s sent to Germany instead.
January 2006: Traffic from several U.S. ISPs hijacked by a telecommunications unit of Con Edison in New York.
February 2008: Pakistan Telecom hijacks YouTube, affecting much of the world.
April 2010: China Telecom, the country’s largest ISP, hijacks the Internet, causing outages spreading to Europe and the U.S.
