Geoff Huston, the chief scientist of APNIC (Asia Pacific Network Information Center), said that there should be a hypothetical “routing police” that will investigate whenever there’s a major internet outage that affects millions of users.
Huston expressed the need in a recently published report about an outage that affected Optus, and an Australian service provider. The said outage affected around 10 million users in Australia, which included businesses and public organization. They were left with no internet services for hours, some even days.
Apparently, the incident happened after one of the peer BGP networks of Optus wrongly advertised a very large route collection to the BGP network of Optus, which caused the routers to crash in “some manner.”
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Now, Huston pointed out that if the incident were a bank heist, the scene would “no doubt be saturated with investigators.”
But, the incident was a “routing heist” as the BGP routing system took control of the network and put it down. Now, Huston says that the nature of what caused the outage should be examined and known to identify if Optus was negligent.
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Huston said that organizations like APNIC shouldn’t be left alone in doing such investigations. He pointed out that they are not the right entity for such task., same as national regulatory agencies since the internet is a global inter-network communication system by nature.
He suggests that national administrations should take the aviation industry for inspiration, which is equipped with better model for global incident response.
In airline industry investigations, the goal is to not necessarily to find out who’s to blame, but to find the cause of the incident and form preventive measures so it won’t happen again. The internet has become a public service, hence, Huston suggests that the world treat internet service providers and infrastructure as a matter of public safety.