BGP, AS and ASNs
BGP stands for Border Gateway Protocol. It is a protocol that helps the internet to exchange routing information between autonomous systems (AS) each identified with its AS number. Without it, networks would not be able to send and exchange information with each other. Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the internet's courier satnav service. When someone sends a package, the courier service processes it using its equivalent of Waze / satnav and chooses the fastest route to deliver it to its recipient. When someone submits a request across the Internet, BGP is responsible for looking at all of the available paths that data could travel and picking the best route, which usually means hopping between autonomous systems.
Autonomous Systems are what make up the internet. No single organization owns the internet and so it is a collective of cooperating systems that route traffic and packages between each other. Each AS is identified with its own unique number, hence ASN.
So why do we think it is a BGP issue? So far it looks like routing and there is a lot of chatter on twitter that the BGP routes have been dropped from the internet.
The CTO of Cloudflare tweeted that five minutes before the Facebook DNS stopped working, they noticed a large number of BGP route withdrawals.
So at this point it looks like a small mistake in the routing has spread around the world, and now putting it right is taking somewhat longer than it took to break it.
edit: whilst it might be a mistake, hacking groups are now saying they dropped the records, so it remains to be seen ...
As one twitter user said to err is human. To propagate across the entire planet is devops....
Key Takeaways:
- BGP's Critical Role: The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) acts as the internet's navigational system by routing data between autonomous systems (AS).
- Scalability at Work: Platforms like Facebook and Instagram leverage robust cloud infrastructure to scale up to billions of users, making them a remarkable engineering achievement.
- Error Propagation: Even a minor routing mistake can cascade globally, highlighting the fragility of our internet infrastructure.
- Potential Causes: The outage might be due to BGP route withdrawals or possible interference, emphasizing the challenges in managing high-scale networks.