VIDEO
The McLaren Formula 1 Team keeps their network race-ready with ThousandEyes.

The Internet Report

Ep. 44: ​​When BGP Routes Accidentally Get Hijacked: A Lesson in Internet Vulnerability

By Angelique Medina
| August 3, 2021 | 2 min read
Internet Report on Apple Podcasts Internet Report on Spotify Internet Report on SoundCloud

Summary

On this episode, we discuss the July 12th accidental hijacking of 1000+ prefixes belonging to Amazon.


This is The Internet Report, where we uncover what’s working and what’s breaking on the Internet—and why. Today, Mike and I discuss a recent BGP routing incident that had intermittent impacts on Amazon’s services, including Amazon.com and AWS compute resources, during a five-hour period on July 12. When we look into BGP routing at the time, we can see multiple BGP path changes due to a service provider erroneously inserting themselves into the path for a large number of Amazon routes. Watch this episode to see how the BGP incident led to significant packet loss, resulting in service disruption for some Amazon and AWS users. We also discuss why enterprises need to have continuous oversight of the paths their traffic takes over the Internet.


Catch up on past episodes of The Internet Report here.

 Find us on:

Finally, don’t forget to leave a comment on Twitter, tagging @ThousandEyes and using the hashtag #TheInternetReport.

ThousandEyes-WFH-T-Shirt-Offer-Banner.png

related blogs

Blog Thumbnail: Insights From Recent Outages: Starlink & Google Maps SDKs
The Internet Report
Insights From Recent Outages: Starlink & Google Maps SDKs
Just as a detective must gather clues and consider all the evidence, ITOps teams investigating an outage must consider all available data points in context to understand where system failures likely occurred. Recent outages that impacted Starlink and Google Maps SDKs powerfully…
By Mike Hicks | September 30, 2025 | 16 min read
Blog Thumbnail: Diving Into the Red Sea Cable Cuts & More Outage News
The Internet Report
Diving Into the Red Sea Cable Cuts & More Outage News
Gain insights on the Red Sea subsea cable cuts, as well as other recent service disruptions that impacted the Great Firewall of China, Mailchimp, Google, and Verizon.
By Mike Hicks | September 19, 2025 | 18 min read
Blog Thumbnail: All Things BGP: Discovering BGP Zombies & More
The Internet Report
All Things BGP: Discovering BGP Zombies & More
Dive into the world of Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)—the backbone of the Internet—and explore everything from BGP zombies to BGP monitoring best practices.
By Mike Hicks | September 4, 2025 | 44 min read