Overview

On August 30, 2020, CenturyLink, a major global ISP, suffered a massive outage that lasted nearly five hours, affecting websites and services worldwide, including Cloudflare, Google, and OpenTable. This outage had a wide blast radius, affecting numerous other ISPs connected via CenturyLink’s peering network.

Technical Cause

The root cause was a control plane failure stemming from a misconfigured BGP announcement during an attempt to block unwanted traffic. This failure led to total packet loss across the CenturyLink network, disrupting critical internet services globally.

Impact

The outage affected popular streaming services, websites, and essential services like ATMs and emergency services. As a major ISP, CenturyLink’s failure had a far-reaching effect, highlighting the interdependence of internet service providers and the cascading impact of infrastructure failures.

Source: Tech Xplore