Due to a temporary issue at Safe Host, a Swiss data center collocation company, the mobile traffic of various European carriers was accidentally routed through China Telecom for more than 2 hours last Thursday.
The problem started when Safe Host leaked more than 70,000 routes to China Telecom. Because China Telecom has not implemented measures to detect and rectify route leaks, it accepted the routes and began propagating these, as a result of which European traffic began flowing through the company. While issues like this are usually fixed within minutes, the problem continued for over two hours, leading to slower Internet and connection issues for European users.
Unauthorized rerouting of Internet traffic is a security hazard. If a threat actor manages to do this, they can insert themselves in the middle of communications and perform eavesdropping.
Read more: China Routed Traffic from European Carriers for Two Hours